The Problem With Jon Stewart - Deep Sh!t State: Trump’s Retribution Campaign

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

As Trump targets the FBI and Justice Department for retribution, Jon is joined by former FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Michael Feinberg and New York Times FBI and DOJ reporter Devlin Barrett. They explore how high-profile cases have damaged these agencies' credibility, discuss the dismantling of their workforces and investigative capacity under Trump's administration, and consider what happens when law enforcement is weaponized for vengeance and power consolidation. Plus, what can Chuck Schumer learn from Joe Biden, and does Jon watch Fox News? This podcast episode is brought to you by: GROUND NEWS - Go to https://groundnews.com/stewart to see how any news story is being framed by news outlets around the world and across the political spectrum. Use my link to get 40% off unlimited access with the Vantage Subscription. MINT MOBILE - New customers get 3 months of unlimited wireless for just $15 a month at https://mintmobile.com/tws INDEED - Speed up your hiring with Indeed. Go to https://indeed.com/weekly to get a $75 sponsored job credit. SMALLS - For a limited time only, get 60% off your first order PLUS free shipping when you head to https://Smalls.com/tws Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more:  > YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast> TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast  > X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod   > BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/theweeklyshowpodcast.com Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Lead Producer – Lauren Walker Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic  Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Researcher & Associate Producer – Gillian Spear Music by Hansdle Hsu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is John Stewart. We are coming to you. Oh, on a beautiful August, mugginess day, the humidity is 180%. It is Wednesday, August 13th. What are we doing? It's a middle of August. You don't want to hear me. You want to be sitting somewhere with your feet in the water, sipping yourself a nice, what do they call it there, apparel spritz? or perhaps maybe knowing our audience a little better, a little maister brow and a bong hit, whatever it is that you want to do to get yourselves through these August dog days of summer, we're going to be talking about for our final episode of the summer, a little thing called the deep state. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the deep state.

It's the part of this state that's very, boy, it's embedded in there. You can't get it. There's a splinter in the heart of the body politics. that is corrupting all of it. And we've got two guests who are going to be discussing the deep state in the Department of Justice and the FBI, one of whom actually has worked at the FBI for 16 years and was just let go because he was friends with someone that the Trump administration doesn't

like. And the other is a reporter on the Department of Justice on the deep state. And so we're going to dig into it all today. in the, it's the deep state, deep in the heart of August, deep in the heart of summer. Let's get right to it. We're going to get to our guests. We've got Michael Fyberg, who I assume we would say a former FBI agent. We've got Devlin Barrett, who is a New York Times reporter on FBI, Department of Justice,

all these types of issues. I want to thank you guys both for joining us here. Devlin is, for those you who are watching this on YouTube, in a secure location. I don't know where in the bowels of the Department of Justice. Michael Feinberg. I'm going to start with you, Michael, since you are in many ways at the top of the news. You just resigned.

How long ago? Two weeks ago? No, it was, I sent the letter of resignation on June 1st, I believe. June 1st. It was either May 31st or June 1st, whichever was. Sunday of that weekend. So you've, you've, you resigned from, uh, the FBI rather than, and I'll let you tell the story, rather than have to testify about, uh, under oath, about your relationship with a friend of yours who used to work at the FBI. Yeah. So it's a,

it's a little bit more complicated than that. I hope so. I have, yeah, I have, I have zero problem whatsoever testifying about anything in my life, whether it's, it's a little bit more complicated than that. I hope so. I have, I have, I have, I have, I have, I have, I have, I have, I have, social relationships, personal life, professional work, whatever. I've nothing to hire or be ashamed of. But Dan Bongino, the current individual occupying the office of the FBI's deputy director, found out somehow, I'm still not exactly quite sure of the mechanics that I was friends with Pete Strach. Pete Strach is a former FBI agent who is famously on Trump's shit list.

Yes. Along with his, I guess, a former girlfriend. friend of his Lisa Page. Is that correct? Yes. And, you know, somehow Dan Bongino discovered this, and it was made very clear to me through a series of phone calls with my special agent in charge, who was in direct communication with Bongino that my career was essentially over. I was in for a number of promotions to the senior executive service. How long had you been with the FBI, Michael, if you don't mind me asking? Sixteen years. So you'd been there 16 years. And in those 16 years, I'm assuming you had a lot of commendations. You had worked your way up through the process there.

Yeah, I was what we refer to as a senior leader. I was the number two in charge of one of our field offices. I've received the FBI's highest investigative commendation, the director's award for a major Chinese counterintelligence case. Now, this was with Huawei. Is that the case that you had done? Yeah, so I was sort of the overall architect of that investigation. And I've received a number of commendations from the Director of National Intelligence and other FBI awards. My career was going very well. And I was sort of on a glide path to a senior executive position. And when Dan Bongino discovered that I was friends with Pete, I was told those promotions are never going to happen that I should.

prepare to actually be demoted, which usually means a relocation. And my wife was in her seventh month of a high-risk pregnancy. And also that I was going to the very least be polygraphed about the nature of my relationship with Pete. And given all that and given what was going on in my personal life, as heartbreaking as it was, you know, to quote the stones, I decided to walk before they made me run. Right. Resigned. How many FBI agents do you think quote the stones on their way out the door?

Probably not that many. Although crossfire hurricane, you know, the investigation, which sort of started this all does come from a Jumpin Jack flashline. It all goes back to the stones. Devlin Barrett, I'm going to ask you to jump in here. So Michael is basically relaying a story of an exemplary FBI agent, one who has been commended at the highest levels of search. He is on his path, on a track, moving up.

This is the kind of institutional knowledge and skill that any organization would need to function at the highest level who has been suddenly demoted based on, and I hate to throw this back to it, but some sort of middle school, you're friends with a kid that we don't like. So now we're going to remove you from law enforcement. Devlin, how insane, not to perjardize the question, how insane is this? This is a problem that exists now that has not existed in the FBI in the entire post-Wargate era. Like what you're seeing, Mike's case is an important example, but there are lots of other important example where senior or low-level FBI agents get letters saying under the president's

constitutional authority, you're out. These letters are from Cash Patel, who is the head of the FBI, or Dan Bongino, who is the deputy? In Michael's case, it was Dan Bongino and the other, are these usually from Cash Patel? I've seen both versions. I've seen some from Cash and I've seen some from Bongino. These fly in the face of civil service laws, these fly in the face of how the rules have always worked at the Bureau.

It is so cute. It is so cute to me that you. you would say, hey, this is, this is against civil service. Right. But here's why it matters, right? Like, all due respect to Mike, like, it's not really about Mike's career. It's about all the other agents at the bureau who see what happens to Mike and are, and now have to worry, wait, if I catch a case that like pisses somebody at headquarters off, am I like, I'm not just in trouble? I'm done.

And to be, to be clear, like, Mike. didn't catch such a case. Mike just knows a guy socially that they don't like. That's a different issue. But the lesson that keeps these firings, I often have this discussion with people who are like, look, so they're firing federal workers. You know, there's a lot of people in this country who would say, good, fire more federal workers. We don't care. But here's the thing about firing federal workers. Whatever you think the size of the federal government should be, whatever you think the size of the FBI should be, it's important for these institutions to have some walls around them so they can do their jobs and do difficult things well. Difficult things like investigate corruption, difficult things like investigate spies.

And if what you're doing in these firings is you are sending a message to the workforce, not Mike, the people who are still there. Sure. That if you cross the people who are running the show, if you cross them, your career is dead. Well, I think it's also a question of, you know, look, any organization has when a new administration comes in, there's going to be a different set of metrics that are going to go for promotions or for demotions. There's going to be a different culture that's been instituted. I think the question here is that these people aren't being fired for incompetence. They're not being fired for bloat. Let's say it's, you know, organizational bloat. They are being fired. vindictively based on no through no fault of their own that they worked on cases that the president administration thinks they shouldn't have worked on. Would that be correct? Yeah. I mean, they're firing people for a lot of different reasons, but that is one of the primary reasons they are firing people. Michael, are you still in touch with, you know, when Devlin

talks about this isn't so much about the people who have been fired, although I think, you know, for the people that are fired, they probably feel that way. But are you in touch with people who say, yeah, this, this changes the way we do our or can do our jobs? Oh, absolutely. It's been really interesting in a very sorrowful way for me to go through this process because I'm in this odd situation where in the week or two after I left, I lost 90% of my close friends. I'm talking about people who are at my wedding. I'll explain it. I'll explain it.

Like, people who are at my wedding, people who are at my bachelor party, people with whom I vacation celebrated the holidays with, they're afraid to be associated with me now. And they've got mortgages, they've got tuition payments, they've got families they need to take care of. They can't afford to get fired simply because we're friends. And with the spade of polygraphs and weird social First Amendment Association oversight that's going on, they're really afraid to be in touch with me. But at the same time, I'm getting contacted over Signal or LinkedIn. Oh, by Pete Hegseth, giving you details of the next. No, by complete strangers from both DOJ and the FBI who are looking to me now. for guidance as to how they should handle very anomalous situations with ambiguous authorities

in which they're being told to do things they're not entirely comfortable with. Without giving away names or necessarily how that goes. But when you say anomalous situations, can you be more specific on that? Yeah, I'll just pull one from the news in the past few days. It is not normal for FBI special agents to be doing street patrols in the District of Columbia. It's only happened once in history. That was also during the first Trump administration during the civil unrest and protests that occurred after the death of George Floyd. This is not something FBI agents are trained to do.

It's not something they have practice with. It's not something they really have a lot of legal authorities. a use of force continuum to which they can look to moderate how they act with the public. It's just not normal in the scope of American history to have them doing this. And a lot of them are really concerned, all right, we get that we're being ordered to do this now. But eventually, assuming democracy does not collapse, which I think is an open question, like there's going to be a change of administration or there's going to be a change in congressional minorities, and there's going to be oversight hearings or inspector general investigations and

what's going to happen to the people who are doing things that are clearly going to be politically disfavored by the next administration. Well, that gets us into, Devlin, that's, you know, look, we've talked a little bit about, you know, a new administration comes in. They fire people that worked on cases that they disfavored and it puts a chilling effect on there. Are we now, Develin entering a cycle, a sort of Maoist cycle of purges and retribution on the change of every administration? Or is this so particular to this one administration who's, I mean, let's face facts, the fuel at the nuclear core of this administration is vengeance and vindictiveness? Right. This is a lot about retribution. And this is a lot about going after the institutions

that Trump blames for the cases against him, you know, I think one of the ways to understand what's happening right now is this is actually a very human story, which is, I don't know a single person who's ever had their home searched by detectives, agents, whatever, no matter what the evidence showed, I don't know, a single person who's gone through that experience and does not come out of it deeply, deeply, deeply bitter against the people who did that. And what you're seeing is, I think, a very human retribution campaign against all of the people that he's mad at or even thinks he's mad at. I think that's the nicest way I've ever heard that put in terms of excusing. But I would suggest that Trump, his original, before anybody had ever searched his house,

was a locker up guy. He gave speeches in 2050. Like, he wanted to. jail political opponents. He wanted to be the strong man. He always seems to have admired, he used to talk about Victor Orban and Erdogan and Putin. Is this really a question of a guy who's been, you know, emotionally scarred by law enforcement overreach? Because it doesn't feel that way. Hey, everybody.

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Subscribe for 40% off the unlimited access Vantage subscription that brings the price down to about $5 a month. Well worth it. That's groundnews.com slash steward or scan the QR code on screen. So two things. Yeah. One, I joke with sources all the time. It is not 2025. It is 2016 part nine.

We are still trapped on the, on the, you know, hamster wheel of 2016 politics. And I don't know when we're getting off it. So that's one. I take the point. But I will say most of the people I cover and talk to, and I'd be very curious what Mike thinks of this. Most of the people I talk to and cover say that this administration is profoundly different in how it approaches and manages the justice. Department than the first Trump administration, that what is going on now is deeply, deeply different and more damaging than what happened in the first one. And that's not to say the first one was all

like sunshine and flowers, but this is different and this is much more alarming to a lot of the career agents and prosecutors who've been through both. Michael, you were there for both of those. What's your thought? Yeah. So I think the main difference is that during the first Trump administration, you still had institutionalists being appointed to cabinet-level positions. Jeff Sessions had been a U.S. attorney. William Barr had been an attorney general beforehand. They were certainly more aggressive on the right-wing side of things, and they were larger believers in the unitary executive theory than predecessors. But they still had a respect for the norms, largely of the Justice Department.

And say what you will about the Federalist Society, when Leonard Leo was picking nominees for positions, you knew they'd at least been through certain schools, held certain jobs, gone through, they'd trod a certain path that made them familiar with the organs of U.S. government, and they had a knowledge of the history of those particular building and cabinet departments. Now, you've got a criminal defense team. Yeah, Emil Beauvais and Todd Blanche

were AUSAs. That's not really a high-ranking position at DOJ. They were more personal lawyers for Donald Trump. Yeah, they were his criminal defense team. I mean, same with Pam. I don't think Pam Bondi ever held a federal government position. These are people who have no reverence for the norms and traditions of the Robert F. Kennedy building. These are people who view... Let's talk about that. So let's do a defense of norms and traditions. I will happily do that. Because in my mind, you know, I hear this a lot about these guys are violating norms and traditions. That's not by definition a bad thing. And we can talk about

the FBI. Look, there is a strong history within the FBI. Obviously, J. Edgar Hoover, most famously weaponized it, not necessarily for a particular executive, but for Georgia Edgar Hoover. So he used it, you know, they just released the, you know, MLK files where it was very clear the FBI attempted to drive him to madness and suicide based on that. It's not as though even the reports about the Russia investigation into Trump or Comey's investigation, into Hillary Clinton's emails are rife with all kinds of instances of overreach. So the question isn't necessarily that the norms and traditions are so pristine. It's that this is abjectly corrupt and personal.

Wouldn't that be the case? I would take slight issue with your characterization. I think I'll be. Somebody's got to? Yeah. Just I think the. the narrative you just provided is 100% true

basically up until 1974, 75, and 76. And then in the aftermath of Watergate, the FBI and the intelligence community is subject to a number of congressional hearings, most famously the Church Committee, but also the Pike and Rockefeller commissions. And out of that,

you get a new statutory framework and you get a new tradition of independence of the Justice Department from the White House, which I really think does hold for the next, you know, roughly 40 or 50 years. But a lot of it's not codified. The notion that presidents don't take a personal role in prosecutorial decisions or sentencing memorandums or things of those nature, it's really held, but it's entirely by a respect. for the norms that happened after Watergate and a recognition by largely responsible presidents and officials, regardless of their politics, that Watergate was a bad thing. It's not something

we want to repeat. And that's just gone. That's just gone. Can I talk about that framework. Yeah, because I want to talk about that framework that that was established and whether or not it, it was followed through. And go ahead. So here's how I would characterize it. And I would actually kind of disagree with both of you a little bit in this sense. Hey, what the heck? For the since 2016, there has been this long running political debate about the rule of law, right? We have to uphold the rule of law. We have to protect the rule of law. And I think the mistake that a lot of liberals made in sort of talking about and defending the Justice Department and the FBI, which are not perfect places. They make mistakes, but they are ideals that people try to uphold. And in talking about the

rule of law, the argument was always made. The rule of law is above politics. The rule of law protects the political system. And I'll be honest, as someone who has been covering this world for, you know, since the late 90s, I just never have believed that to be true. The political system is above and protects the rule of law. And I think, think what you are actually seeing and what we've been experiencing through this whole arc, whenever you want to start the clock, is that the rule of law system, these institutions tried to assert dominance over the political system. And the political system said, no, we will not allow that. And so what you have now is you have a Congress that is not going to save the FBI. You have a Congress that is not going to save the Justice Department. Go back to this, Devin. So you say that the justice system tried to assert dominance over the political system. In what sense? So look at, I don't mean they deliberately set out to do that. What I'm saying is if you look at what Comey did, not to harp on an old thing, but if you look at what Comey did in 2016, Comey had an outsized influence on that election.

And I think the sort of behavioral lesson that everyone took from that. Now, to go back to give context to that, I think what you're referring to is in the, so there's the Hillary Clinton email investigation. there's the thought that Russia has. I mean, this is sort of, if we go back and unravel the whole original sin of this story arc, at least. It kind of begins with the meetings at Trump Tower where supposedly Russian influencers agents said, or we have information on Hillary Klinner, we'll get information, or they were asked by the Trump administration to get information. And this has kicked off this.

cycle, which goes into Trump has a server in the basement where he's connected to banks, which turns out not to be true, the Steele dossier, which turns out to be filled with falsehoods. But ultimately, the real lever moment that you're talking about, Devlin, is a few weeks before the election, Comey says, I'm reopening an investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails and her numbers plunge three to four percentage points immediately. Correct. Would that be accurate? Yes. And I think that essentially opened Pandora's box for everything that has happened since.

That's my whole theory of the case. Michael, in terms of being at the FBI in that moment, as Devlin is talking about, how aware is the rank and file about this email investigation, the Russian? What is the conversation around all these issues that's going on in the FBI at 2015, 2016? So it's a little difficult for me to generalize because, At that time, I came to headquarters as a supervisor in the counterintelligence division in the end of 2015 when a lot of this stuff was going on. And as a result, like, the people who were working on the Hillary Clinton email investigation, the people who were working on the Russia investigation in its really nascent stages, these

were all friends of mine. These are the people I socialized with, the people I carpooled with, the people with whom, you know, I got beers after work or coffee during the work day. How big is this? I mean, give us a sense of how big this system is. It's huge. So, I mean, by virtue of these sort of social connections and the people with whom I worked, I had inklings of what was going on.

But despite what the public perception is, it's not like the entire FBI or even all of headquarters was aware of every step in these cases. They were pretty locked down. Like I said, I had inklings because I knew people, but they weren't giving me details on a day-to-day basis remotely of anything that was going on. So most of the FBI, certainly everybody in the field office is outside of D.C. and everybody outside of the counterintelligence division at headquarters was not really tracking. We all knew that the Clinton email investigation was occurring because that was a matter of public record. The Russia investigation, people forget, was pretty locked down until after the election, or at least until after the Intel community assessment

about Russian interference came out. These investigations are what we would call restricted, which means I can't even go into FBI systems and look things up if I'm not a member of the case team. They did a really good job of locking down the details of the Clinton email investigation because everybody knew it was going on because the Justice Department had announced so. It was a public referral that originally led to the opening. The Russia investigation, we knew there was something going on. because there were these previously unused rooms that now had people going in and out of them and people were pulled from their original assignments to go sit other places. So we knew there was something in the air, but we had no idea what it was.

The fact that there was an investigation into members of the Trump campaign and potential connectivity to the Russian intelligence services was not something the general workforce knew at all. All right. So Devlin, you know, what are the rules in place? So this is all taking place that certain members of the FBI are off on the Hillary Clinton investigation. Certain members of the FBI are simultaneously investigating connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. You just said you don't really buy the idea that politics and, and law enforcement are these two separate entities, but that law enforcement kind of inserted itself into this political scene, and this is the blowback from that. Is that what's happening in that moment? Yeah.

I mean, look, I think the public sort of election turmoil, let's say, that the FBI created or participated in 2016 was really about Clinton email, right? because most of the details, most of our understanding of the Russia investigation prior to the election wasn't known to the public at that time. We could see little bits and pieces, but, you know, I think in some ways the public was even more in the dark than Mike was in terms of like what this Russia investigation was about until well after the election. And I think, like I said, no institution is perfect. There were significant errors of judgment. made in, I would say, both the Russian investigation and the Clinton email investigation. And they are both

sort of cautionary tales in why it is very dangerous to pick up a radioactive, highly political, presidential campaign-related investigation and expect to come out of that unscathed. I think the FBI leadership in that moment misjudged how much credibility it had with the American people and misused its position at a key moment, particularly on the announcement of the Clinton email case. But at the end of the day, you need a good, well-functioning FBI. At the end of the day, you need a good, well-functioning justice department. And I think what you're seeing now, as we come to like more and more iterations of this political fight around DOJ, you're seeing a less and less functional version of those institutions.

And the joke I always have made is like, look, I cover federal law enforcement. If I'm on the front page of the paper on any particular day, you know, that's just a regular day. If what I cover is on the front page of the paper, maybe two different stories or maybe three different stories the same day, like the country's got a problem. Like, that is not a good place for the country to be in if what I do for a living is that front and center to sort of the public discussion of what's happening in this country. And we've been in that situation now for years. All right, folks. we're in the middle of summer and I know you're probably throwing a lot of your money down

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See MintMobil for details. The strange thing is, Devlin, and we'll get to sort of where Michael then fits into that, is without any kind of a reckoning over how the Justice Department and the FBI handled those radioactive cases in 2015 and 2016. There was no real, you know, church committee. There was no memorandum that went out that talked about the various things. It was Comey came out and wrote a book about how he was wronged and all these different things. It wasn't addressed. What the Trump administration is doing now with Bongino and Patel for their audience, for the MAGA audience, is the corrective. What we're seeing now is, you know, phony,

news is news that hurts Trump. A corrupt DOJ and FBI is a DOJ and FBI that investigates Trump. It's all now just related not to any norms, not to any memoranda, not to any best practices. Everything in our government is now related to one man. It's as though our government is a subsidiary of the Trump organization. Is it not, Devlin? I think it is. And I think that, that works in two ways. One, that has long been essentially a conservative argument about executive power, right? There are ways in which what Trump is doing fits into a broader argument that conservatives have made in this country for years. But there are some parts of this that are unique to Trump's desire for total control and Trump's desire for revenge and retribution. And, you know, I was saying when the, when the D.C. takeover of the, when the federal takeover of the D.C. police force happened. You know, one of the things I said to a colleague is like, look, In many days, he tries to be the mayor of the United States. He is an incorrigible micromanager in that sense. And I think there are ways in which these institutions were not designed for that.

These institutions don't work well in that environment. I think the FBI is certainly one of them. You've got just to Mike's point about, you know, agents being out on the street, you know, loss in all this is like, agents don't carry tasers. Like, forget the training for a second. If an agent encounters a problem on the street, one, most of those agents have never done, you know, street law enforcement, and they have one tool at their disposal, and that's a gun. That is not smart. That is, that has risks with it. Now, I think FBI agents are pretty smart. I think FBI agents understand what they don't know and are careful in that way, most of them. But the way these institutions are now being used at Trump's direction are not the ways they were designed to be used. And there are risks in that that I don't think are immediately obvious to the public. Is that, Michael, is that the worry for you with those?

Like, for instance, you're a guy who is, you've worked on all these cases, espionage cases with China. You speak Mandarin. And by the way, let's be clear with the audience. Michael is not a died in the world, bleeding heart liberal that's been removed for his things. You were a member of the Federalist Society at Northwestern. Consider yourself a conservative, a constitutional concern. which is, I think, at this point, a relatively unique creature. But is that your concern that he's basically using really specialized tools as hammers?

I have a lot of concerns. That is certainly one of them. Devlin is very correct. The FBI, I mentioned this earlier, but I realized I should probably explain what I mean by it because a lot of people in the audience have. never worked in law enforcement. If you are a patrol officer for a state or local police department, you have what's called the use of force continuum. If the person you're talking to punches you, you can maybe use a chemical agent. If they continue to fight you, you could escalate to a baton

or a taser. Like, those may not be the exact examples, but it's like there are steps you can take. Rules of engagement. Exactly. The FBI, Why? Because traditionally, we're only dealing with our subjects when we're doing an arrest or a court-ordered search or an interview. We don't have that. We have a set of rules for what to do if our life is threatened. Okay. But like we don't carry tasers. It's pretty rare to carry a baton or a chemical agent. You have a Glock. And if there is an imminent threat to your life or a civilian's life, you're authorized to use it. But we're not trained for dealing with protests in the street or crowds of people getting unruly. Well, even a chain of command, Michael, I'm just curious.

Now we're just talking logistically. So let's say 500 FBI agents are deployed onto the streets. of Washington, D.C., in support of maybe National Guard, which has also been deployed, or maybe Metropolitan Police, which are, I think, normally deployed. What is the chain of command? Who would your, is your, I guess, authority still Cash Patel? So it's weird.

And when we very suddenly were ordered into the streets in 2020, that was a question a lot of us were asking. What is our statutory authority for doing this? What are the legal violations we're investigating? We were just sort of told, and never in writing, that the Attorney General of the United States has authorized you to do this. And we were deeply uncomfortable with that. And the only thing that really kept us,

within the boundaries of what's acceptable in American civic culture is frankly the good judgment of the squad supervisors. And I'm not just saying that to puff myself up because I was one at the time, but you had squads of agents led by a supervisor walking the streets in D.C. And those supervisors were making judgment calls in every tricky situation about how to handle it. And in general, I think they acquitted themselves very well. But even that's not enough for this administration because there was one group of squads that got surrounded by protesters who were yelling and shouting at them. And they decided to take a knee to de-escalate the situation.

Now, we can debate about whether that was the right course of action. There is certainly a wide variety of opinion within the FBI itself. But all of those agents, as of a few weeks ago, when I left that, FBI, they were being punished for something that occurred five years ago. So every agent who took a knee, they were being punished for. Every agent who took a knee in 2020 in 2025 was removed from their position of leadership. Whoa. So wait, what are the, so right now within the FBI, if you're an FBI agent, up until now, what are the offenses that you could have? have committed that would get you removed. So it's being friends with an agent who worked on

or is an enemy supposedly of the president. Is it anybody who worked on these Russia investigations? It's simpler than that. It's simpler than that. What is really happening is they are trying to turn over as many leaders and line personnel as humanly possible so they can replace them with people who are inculcated in their own values. Most of the special... Ideologs. Ideologs on the line. Yeah, every special agent in charge who's been removed or told they're going to be transferred if they don't retire or what have you.

Like, the overwhelming majority of these people just had the misfortune to be appointed by Chris Ray during the Biden years. There's no real allegation of impropriety. Well, that's what I was going to say. They're just cleaning the decks. There may be plenty of people who agree wholeheartedly with Donald Trump who were working on the Russia investigation because that was their job, not because they were ideologically opposed to him. Yeah, we never got to pick the investigations on which we worked. Like, we were aside them.

So what is that, Michael, let me ask you, what does that do to the nation's law enforcement, institutional knowledge and readiness if the first. order of hiring is purely that you are ideologically in line, that you pledge your fealty to Donald Trump. How do you, can they fill out an organization of competent people who also do that? No, the integrity of the organization is totally destroyed. If your number one priority is ideological rigor or political loyalty, by definition, there are going to be certain cases you choose to pursue, in certain cases you choose not to pursue. I don't think it's a coincidence that we've seen the gutting of the DOJ and FBI's public corruption program, both domestically and internationally under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

since this administration came in part. Talk about specifically when you talk about the gutting of corruption agencies, because that's something, look, the Supreme Court has. has issued decisions that it's almost impossible to get, I would think, corruption convictions anymore because there has to be explicit quid pro quo. And in terms of executive privilege, there is almost total immunity. So even forget about what they're doing with the ideological function within the FBI. What about just the legal framework around getting corruption cases going and convicting. So the only area in which the Supreme Court has really spoken extensively about

this in the past few years is with respect to executive power under Article 2, to the president. It's important to note that the overwhelming majority of public corruption prosecutions have nothing to do with the White House or the executive branch. Well, let's go, do you remember the governor of Virginia, McDonne, I don't know if you worked on that case at all, but do you remember that corruption case in Virginia? I do. Yeah. So he was convicted of, you know, getting a gold watch and all these other things for favors. There was a Supreme Court case that basically said, well, we don't find, I guess, explicit quid pro quo. So that's fine.

Doesn't that change the bar of corruption for what FBI agents would investigate? It doesn't. It doesn't. You know, in most public corruption cases, there's not a lot of gray area. The quid pro quo is pretty explicit. There was a decision involving, I think it was Rob Belgojevich, that there used to be something called the honest services statute. And that basically said it was a real malleable law, which basically said, if you're

depriving the people of honest services, you can go to jail for public corruption. And this is sort of famously when Rod Blagojevich attempted to auction. off essentially Barack Obama's Senate seat. Yeah. That ruling had a lot of effect on how easy public corruption prosecutions were simply because that was an easy law to leverage precisely because it was so vague. And there's a very colorable argument that it was too vague. And the court was right to narrow it down a little bit. I generally think we want our laws to have as much specificity as possible because I don't want as an FBI agent, I'm not an elected official. There is no real democratic accountability for me with the electorate. So I want very specific laws that take away my

discretion, just as a member of a functioning democracy. The quid pro quo thing, I would say in the overwhelming majority of public corruption cases, you do have that quid pro quo happening to such a degree that it's not going to be an issue. So I'm much less concerned. You don't think this will have a chilling effect on the ability to bring public corruption. Forget about the politicized nature of it. But even, you know, when the president says, we're going to make it legal to bribe foreign governments for, you know, corporate entities. That's a different thing. The quid pro quo decision I'm less concerned about, largely because the quid pro quos are happening explicitly in most cases.

And secondly, if you're engaged in public corruption, you're also engaged in a whole host of other legal activity, usually laundering proceeds or committing wire fraud or what have you, that you could still be indicted on. There's more than one way to skin a cat. There are ancillary crimes that go along with some sort of because you have to hide the profits of more corruption. Exactly. So I'm not super concerned with the quid pro quo decision. I am immensely concerned with the executive immunity decisions, partly because, I mean, it makes it impossible to ever go after a president for pretty much any conduct whatsoever. But I also think

it's totally in odds with U.S. history and founding ideals. You know, one person, one DOJ person said to me years ago, you know, Trump is going to do a lot of cases that are good for Trump and bad for the country. That's just how this is going to play out. And if you look at the immunity decision, for example, one of the things I think is amazing about the immunity decision that the Supreme Court handed up is that under the terms of that decision, the Mueller investigation would basically never happen now. There'd be no way to have any information. The premise of it wouldn't fly.

and the factual gathering of the information would also not fly. And so there's almost no way to sort of imagine a Mueller investigation in this environment. And honestly, I don't think that's an accident. I think that is a significant number of conservatives on the Supreme Court expressing their dismay and distrust of how the DOJ has done this in recent years. Right. Hey, what do you got there? Business? You realize your business needed to hire?

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Just go to Indeed.com slash weekly right now. support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash weekly. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring? Indeed is all you need. Look, I am a conservative. I studied constitutional law literally under one of the founders of the Federalist

Society, Steve Calabrese. But the unitary executive theory, that's pretty far afield from what any of the founders ever intended the president to be. Like, the whole point was to place restrictions on the operation of government, not to create an expansive executive power. So this is my view. See, that seems to be, you know, this gets us to maybe the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the MAGA movement, which is it is a movement that absolutely cloaks itself in constitutional rhetoric and almost fetishizes, you know, how many of the guys I got the constitution here. They wrap their buses and we the people. But it is, if anything, it's better with the, it's, it's anti-federalist.

It's more articles of confederation. It doesn't appear to be in any way, have any fealty to constitutional principles of free speech, you know, checks and balances, any of those things. Yeah. I would humbly suggest if your devotion to the Constitution is largely manifested, through a We the People tattoo and an affinity for the Gadsden flag, your understanding of federalist principles is probably not as deep as you think it is. I mean, I'm just going to be like, you're saying they may not in fact be tread on. Is that what I'm hearing? As somebody, like, I really do consider myself a philosophical and constitutional conservative. Right. But that

requires a lot of thought and a lot of penetrating discussions about what words, mean. And, like, were the founders looking at Locke and Mill or Burke or what have you when they were coming up with these systems? It's not simply saying, I don't like what you're doing, therefore it's unconstitutional. Like, you have to actually engage with these ideas on a regular basis in a way that even makes you question your own beliefs. Or the project has no intellectual integrity. And when I was coming of intellectual age in college and law school, the conservative movement, I think, was very into that. Your audience would probably disagree with a lot of the conclusions we came to, but there was an honest rigor of thought that is totally lacking in the MAGA

movement. Well, because I think what they've done is they've sort of ceded any kind of that rigor to the emotional kind of impulse of one individual that they believe stands above kind of all of it. And they've even, I think, infused him with a sort of religious fervor. But Devlin, you know, you've got these organizations, you know, the DOJ, the FBI. I mean, we're talking about law enforcement.

Trump's influence writ large has been enormous. But if he rewrites the, purpose and principle of all those organizations, have we lost the one thing that may be made America exceptional, which is the stability of these institutions? Are we now in a kind of retribution cycle? Because if I'm the Democrats, I'm watching Donald Trump and going, oh, my God, he's just exposed a whole host of levers of power that we never exercised, that now we will. I think that's right. And there's a couple ways of thinking about that. One is the Cash Patel selection as the FBI director. I think it's safe to say that whenever a Democrat comes into power, Cash Patel will no longer be the FBI director.

And you will have lost one of the sort of, you know, institutional sandbars that protected that institution from political changes. Now, some people will say, certainly some people in the Bureau will say it's a good thing if Democrats replace Cash Patel when that situation comes to pass. But the other way to think about this problem, and again, I am a Justice Department reporter. I do not cover politics, but politics has swamped the Justice Department clearly. And politics, to me, it seems pretty clear that politics is less and less about what people believe, and it's more and more about who people hate. And so in that model, places like the Justice Department and places like the FBI, which investigate politicians, are going to be under greater and greater pressure. And I think, you know, after 9-11, there was a significant debate about should we, you know, abolish some part of the FBI and reconstitute it in a different way. I think the FBI, if you destroyed it tomorrow, not saying that's going to happen or should,

but if you destroy the FBI tomorrow, it would be rebuilt in some form because the American people still on some basic level believe there should be an entity like the FBI. But at the same time, it has to be a credible, reliable, trustworthy institution for it to do its job well. And that is the part that is really difficult right now. for a whole host of reasons, you know, one of the biggest ones being Donald Trump. Right. I mean, I would say, so this gets us back to sort of the character, the characterization of those institutions as the deep state.

You know, Trump came in and he basically characterized any of these sort of organizations within the government that may not have expressed loyalty to him as the deep state. So now it's in the minds. Look, there's always been a distrust, I think, through civil libertarians or through different political groups of law enforcement, of DOJ, of FBI. After 9-11, the Patriot Act supercharged certain kind of digital espionage and all kinds of other things that people, I think, were very, and rightfully so, uncomfortable with how it was going to be exercised. But this concept of deep state is a really powerful, is a really powerful one and can be utilized by anybody who has some concerns about how government is going to use its authority. And Michael, I'll ask you because, look, Cash Patel and Dan Bungino are deep state guys. They're the ones who are like, the deep state is a problem. When we get in there, we're going to expose the deep state. We're going to expose that Ray Epps is a plant and a Fed. we're going to expose the Epstein files, and then they get in there and bupkis.

So what happened there? So there's a real irony here in that the deep state never existed. The notion that the FBI as an institution was a hotbed of anti-Trump activity in 2015 and 2016 is pretty ludicrous. I don't think it's going to come as a shock to anybody that most FBI agents probably lean right. Despite what people think, we don't really talk about it at work. It is a political place. But most people who choose to go into law enforcement for a career are the sort of people who are rooting for Javert when they read Laemus Rape. Like, it's, you know, it's a certain

mindset. So, like, there never was a deep state. But ironically, what Patel and Bongino are doing in terms of trying to root it out are actually creating it. They're getting rid of people who really value political independence, institutional integrity, ideological blindness. The only people that are going to be left by the time they're done three and a half years by now are people at the executive levels who are willing to bend their principles for the party in power. How cynical was this, Michael? Like when, you know, so all this stuff about Ray Epps being a Fed and January 6 being a government op that was, you know, a bunch of feds urging on Antifa to storm the capital and get it done or that the deep state was protecting the Epstein list because of that. How much did they believe that?

How cynical was that? and what is the process? Why is this Epstein thing suddenly now? Oh, yeah, no. I mean, if anything looks like Deep State, it's the president's personal lawyer going to interview Galane Maxwell. Off the record without it being recorded.

Right. And then a week later, her being transferred to a minimum security prison where sex offenders are not allowed to be transferred to. Yeah. It's, I mean, there's a couple things to unpack there. First of all, in terms of the cynicism.

You know, there's probably a lot of people throughout the country who really do believe that January 6th was some sort of inside job. I think it's a ludicrous belief, but I don't doubt that there are massive numbers of people who sincerely hold that belief. But were Patel and Bongino amongst them? The notion that anybody who was involved in the stop the steel rally, any of the organizers, they know that's horseshit. Right. I mean, are you really telling me that, like, the PhD holders at the Claremont Institute or various professors across the country, including some at Ivy League universities,

or, you know, like, they know they're peddling bullshit to the masses. Right. Like, so there is an immense amount of cynicism at the top levels. And a lot of gullible people at the lower levels who are being taken advantage of. And I don't know how a country survives that. Devlin, how does, you know, when you talk about how many times have I read Ray Epps? If you look at Ray Epps, the whole thing unravels from January 6th that was all an inside job by the feds. Or when we get in there day one, you're going to see all the names on the Epstein client list and you're going to see, well, now we know Trump is on the list or allegedly on the list.

And Galane Maxwell, after talking to the president's personal lawyer, is transferred to a minimum security prison. And I'm assuming getting surf and turf. Like Devlin, is there a deep state? Was there not a deep state? Was this all cynical bullshit? So there is a lot of cynicism to many of the things you describe. But there are also some human behavior issues that I think are important. Like in the darker moments at the Justice Department and FBI, I think I don't really cover law enforcement.

really cover crime. I cover human behavior. And so let's take the J6 issue, because I think that's an important example. You know, there is a argument that is made that if you just put enough facts on the table, you will show the reality and even the people who don't want to believe you will accede to your reality based on the facts you have shown them. To that, I would just say simply, January 6 was the most videotaped, most recorded, most well-documented crime to ever occur in human history. And there are still a very significant number of people in this country who believe it was some kind of con. There is a smaller group of people who say they believe it was a con, but I am skeptical that they really believe that. And I think we are dealing with a human

behavior problem, not a fact problem. But what about then, Devlin, if it's the most videotaped and some people still think it's a con, but the people that thought it was a con, viewed Trump's reelection as the moment, sort of like in a cult when they say like the world will end May 17th. But they viewed his election as finally the con will be exposed. What happens when the con isn't exposed? Well, I think you're seeing this plays out multiple ways. One, you're seeing a constant demand from Trump's own supporters for that to have. happen. You're seeing demands for indictments. You're seeing demands for, you know, the classic

demand for, you know, frog march them out of the building. You know, that exists in the January 6th space. That exists and certainly in the Epstein space. And the one of the things that happens, I think, with this war on the deep state, this profess declared war on the deep state is one of the features of it as a human behavior function is you're constantly promising the future retribution. And I think one of the challenges that the Epstein thing in particular shows is that there's a real potential price to be paid for never delivering that even when you are in charge. There is a challenge to having someone like Cash Patel in charge of the FBI, which makes arrests, when you don't arrest the people who, you know, rooted for Cash Patel, when Cash Patel does not make

a lot of those arrests, there is a potential political. political price to pay for that. And I think we are just sort of starting to test the limits of that. And I think it's going to be a very interesting, like one of the ways to measure this, right, is when the Epstein stuff was in a really bad place, put the administration in a really bad place a few weeks ago, there was a very quick amping up of the talk about retribution for the Russia investigation. Right. Obama, Clapper. They were all going down. Yes. And you have seen an increase, you know, if you think about levels on a soundboard, you saw them turn down the level, try to turn down the levels on Epstein and try to turn up the levels on the Russia retribution stuff. And I think that is part of a general process, a part of a general behavior of a lot of folks who think this is their season of retribution. But at the end of the day, if you're going to arrest people, if you're going to indict people, I talk to people. who are in the crosshairs of that all the time. And one of the things they say, and I think, you know,

I take them at their word is, look, at the end of the day, I still have some faith in the criminal justice system that in theory, could you investigate me? In theory, could you indict me for something? Sure. But I think no judge and jury would buy that. Maybe they're wrong. I want to be clear, like, there's a world in which that's not true. Michael, you're there. When you're at the FBI and you're seeing online, Ray Epps is a Fed, and that's why January 6th, what is the recourse within the FBI to disprove that? Is there any kind of energy to disprove it? Does everyone just have to hold their powder? So this is, this actually raises a larger issue with whether the FBI, as it's historically been constituted is able, in our current political moment, in an age of mass media,

to maintain the trust of the American people. Traditionally, the FBI, with a few exceptions, Comey's press conference on Clinton being one of them. But even, I'll defend even aspects of that. You know, the FBI has spoken through indictments and through criminal complaints. We have not generally – I apologize. I still say we. They have not generally done pressers. They have not met off the record or one-on-one very frequently with journalists. They only talk through indictments.

So there's never really been a way for the FBI. to push back against the conspiracy theorists or to try and argue its own case outside of the prosecutorial process. And that was particularly true under Director Ray, who was temperamentally loath to do anything like that. And that's never really been an issue because you've always had adults in the White House. we don't have that now. We have an attorney general. We have a president. We have an FBI director, an FBI deputy director who spent eight years trafficking in conspiracy theories as a way of consolidating their own power.

So I don't know how you ameliorate that situation. People have asked me friends, family, other interviewers, like, how does the FBI come back? from this. And I'm pretty pessimistic about it. Like, if we started fixing things today, six months after this administration came into power, seven to eight months after this administration came into power, I think it would take a minimum of a decade. Like, we are not in for an easy road to rebuild what's being lost this year. Well, and now what the courts are doing is they're saying, actually, you know what, take what you want. We're actually done. We're too tired. Part of my point before when we were talking about, you know, the rule of law versus the law of politics is that that relationship is actually the opposite of what a lot of people think. And the courts are, especially the Supreme Court, this administration has a lot riding on the Supreme Court conservative majority, agreeing with them most of the time. And I think that is something that a lot of the public probably hasn't digested or considered very much.

much because it's pretty good. The interesting thing is going to be, how is the Supreme Court going to flip over on its back when a Democrat is in office and wants to exercise that same level of executive control? If the unitary executive only works in Republican administrations, that's going to seem like a larger issue than anything else. Right. And look, what is happening in the country? I would say in the government. Let's just stick with the government. What is happening in the federal government long-term big picture is that power is bleeding away from Congress and bleeding away from the courts and it's pooling into the executive. That has been true for decades. But Trump is essentially an accelerant to that, an aggressive power grabby kind of accelerant to that. And that's going to

keep happening. Well, I imagine what you're seeing now is what you see in the countries that are, have a more autocratic bent. And what you see then is the law enforcement arms being used explicitly for vengeance, for consolidation of power, and for all those different elements. Or you see somebody running to say, again, I'll weed out the deep state. And we're just in this bizarro deep state cycle. We get in a cycle. Yeah. You know, and I've got a lot, like, I don't have a lot.

lot of worries about the FBI workforce. The average agent is somebody whose integrity I trust implicitly. What worries me? But you've said yourself that they're concerned about, you know, they've got families and lives and kids and they may have to go along to get along. And so shouldn't you worry about them? There's there's ways to sort of put sand in the gears if you're really uncomfortable doing something. What concerns me more are the people who are now getting promoted to SAC, who have been explicitly- What's SAC? The special agent in charge. I'm sorry, the head of a field office. There's 55 of them throughout the country. The people who are being made division heads, they're explicitly being told, and I've heard this from some of them, that, like, you are not going

to criticize the director, you are not going to criticize the deputy director, and you are not going to push back against administration priorities. And if you do, you're going to be removed. People who are willing to make that sort of compromise can't stay. Now, but wouldn't you normally say that in an organization, that sounds like, I don't know many organizations that would say your job is to push back against our priorities. No, I would argue what I just described is totally antithetical to the FBI I knew for the better part of two decades. So what would push is not unheard of? For example, there is, I'm not going to get into the specific details.

You don't mean publicly. You mean internally. Internally, yeah. I mean, it was not uncommon under Mueller or call me or Ray for a special agent in charge or an assistant director to visciferously push back against them to the point. of raising voices, almost yelling about their decisions. There was a give and take. There was an understanding of like, look, the only way this organization works is you hire

smart people with a good moral compass and you give them a voice. And at the end of the day, it is a chain of command. So what the director says is going to go. But if we're going to be effective, you need to have an environment where you allow people to voice their honest opinion and push back. it's the only way this works. Is it generally a pushback on norms and morality? Like what would pushback look like?

We can't do that because that's interfering in a political process or we're substituting our judgment for the judgment of our leadership. What would that pushback look like? All of the above. I mean, the FBI was in a really tricky situation with the Clinton email investigations and the Russia investigation in the sense that, like, there was literally nothing the organization could do that was not in some form or fashion going to put a thumb, however slight on the scale. That's not intentionally.

Just like we were investigating. Would the alternative have been not to investigate them at all or to have them? Which you can't do either. So, you know, but the reason I bring it up is I can tell you, I know for a fact that there was a lot of dissent up until the very last moment in both those investigations about what steps should be taken. Right. And I think they, you know, a lot of people have issues with both of those investigations.

But trust me, when I say, they could have been so much worse if people did not have the freedom to honestly voice their opinion about what should be done. Look, folks, I don't know where you're getting your comfort. during these difficult times. But I'm telling you, man, the good comfort is this, cuddling up on the couch with your cat. Now, I don't have a cat, but it does sound pretty nice right now. I have had cats, and they will, contrary to their reputation,

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throughout the Department of Justice and all these, these different areas. I would imagine there's a healthy proportion of people who think, yeah, it's about time, you know, somebody took control of this or this. But there's also a contingent of people that are fearful of what's going to happen, but also want to keep their jobs. You know, how pliable, you know, on a scale of law firms that imploded on one day are hard. Harvard that tried desperately to hold on before whatever payment they're going to fork over. What is the rank and file of our Justice Department in terms of bending to the whims of a strongman?

So I think a lot of people at the Justice Department, this term, have been shocked by how much different this Trump term has been than the first Trump term. I think you see that in the way that hundreds of civil rights lawyers left the department earlier this year just said this is nothing like what we imagined it would be. I can't stay here and use the civil rights laws of America this way. I think there is a desire on the part of many people to dig in and hold on. If you think back, this was a big deal at the time, but it's sort of forgotten now because, you know,

there's always so much chaos. in this space. But if you think back to, there was an email that the head of the New York FBI office sent out early on in the Trump administration that basically talked about, look, we're dealing with problems. I understand that. I'm telling you, as a former Marine, when things get bad, you dig in and you dig a trench and you keep your head down and do your job. And I think a lot of people at the time covered that email as if it was, you know, this call to arms. And I actually read that email completely differently because I thought he was saying something much more sophisticated and thoughtful, which was that dig a trench, like dig a foxhole, get in it,

stay down. And that is how you live to fight another day. Correct. And I think that is the view of a lot of people. Obviously, hundreds of lawyers have left the DOJ. Obviously, people like, Mike, are getting fired for reasons that don't pass the smell test. But there are still many more people I can tell you because I talk to a fair number of them who are like, they will have to give me that letter. They will have to make me go because I believe. And I don't want to misrepresent the scale of the problem. I don't have that much of a sense of how large the DOJ FBI is. I imagine it's massive.

So here's the thing. And are we talking about like a few people around the margins and there's generally this large ball of knowledge that stays? Or does that ball just like it goes to wherever it's forced? There's a couple of ways to think about this. For the Justice Department, the most important people, I would argue, in the system historically, have been the layer of senior career officials. Those are not people that change over during administrations. Those are people who have worked, for example, terrorism cases or supervised. So they have an institutional knowledge of the security of the country.

Exactly. And one of the first things the administration. did, they pushed out all those people. So they just scraped that layer off. And again, I think sometimes that stuff gets covered is like, you know, oh, what a tragedy for these people. And I, I do not discount in any way the personal strife that that is that has brought to people. But the real issue is that all the careers under them, you know, see which way the wind is blowing and see that like, there is no choice but to do exactly what you are told, exactly the way you were told to do it. And being told to do it by people who have not done this before.

You know, there is, there is a great scraping that has happened within these institutions of institutional clout and knowledge and experience. And those have, you know, the thing, the word that gets expressed to me all the time is, look, we can go out and walk a post for 30 days. Like, we're not, we're not babies. We don't have glass jaws. Like, fine, whatever. But, like, I have guys cracking phones in childhood. What are we taking our eyes off of? What are we going to miss?

Where are we going to get caught, caught out because we're not on the stick of all these very specialized things that we normally would be doing? Right. And you won't know till you know. And you won't know till you know. I think, I think we lost Devlin. Yeah. So, Michael, is it your sense that the DOJ operates or had operated similarly or other, you know,

I don't, I don't know if you. have much contact with CIA or Homeland Security or NSA or any of the other 800 organizations currently tasked with watching us and arresting us, you know, or the deprioritizing of ATF, you know, the various things there. Is it your sense that this is a process that's going on throughout all of this infrastructure? Yes, no. FBI and DOJ. are unique in that their mandates are incredibly broad. There are very few criminal laws or national security priorities that the FBI and DOJ do not handle.

In organization like ICE, they're really only doing one thing. Right. Well, now FBI is working with ICE. Yeah, it's insane. And this is a much longer conversation about why that's a terrible idea. But, like, I think in a functioning democracy, you actually want prosecutorial enforcement powers dispersed. You don't want to centralize them. That's how you get a police state.

So it was always a good thing that these agencies were working on separate matters. Now that you're unifying them into these weird Homeland Security task forces, where everybody's involved in immigration and violent gangs, the ones being chosen. and to prosecute, I'm sure, coincidentally, all come from South America. It just so happens. Yeah, this is, this is this sort of centralization of law enforcement authority in operations is something that we've seen. I'm not going to violate Godwin's law here. Please don't.

But like, I'm just saying like, there are, there are eras of history where this has happened. and countries where this has happened, and they're generally not things we want to emulate. Right. Have you through, you know, and obviously you're not just an agent, but also it seems a historian of a lot of this, have you seen those moments where countries move into more authoritative states and these things get, you know, look, we still do at present time have elections. This still can be undone. At present time, this will be the last Trump administration, at least constituted by what we presently think of as the laws against running for another term.

Is it the kind of thing that a country in your experience can find its way out of? Yes, absolutely. I mean, you look at, look, Japan. Germany are vibrant functioning democracies. South Africa, post-apartheid, had the truth of reconciliation communities. But even both of those countries have made recently, I mean, Japan has an ultra-right party that's gaining tremendous. You have alternative for Deutschland and Germany.

But like, they don't run the country yet. And there is significant pushback about them. Neither of those parties have the broad-based support that the MAGA movement has in the United States. Right. But to answer your question, like if and when this ends, like absence some sort of national reconciliation process where we really do the sort of internal searching about how a lot of this consolidation of power and destruction of norms happened, I don't know how we come

back. And I know that sounds really negative. It is. I'm in near despair about the future of our country. And what makes me even more worried is half the nation isn't going to want to have that reconciliation because they see nothing wrong with what's happening. So if I would say not only nothing wrong, but they see it as finally. Good. Yeah. Finally, this is what we're doing. Yeah. I mean, like, look, I don't want to take like an overly Calvinist view of humanity or get too hops in here. But like it's been. It's been done here before. I mean, like, I do think human beings just in general, like, we don't know as much as we think we do.

We're pretty craven. We're pretty tribal. And like, for about 250 years, we had a really good system of checks and balances that tamped down on that. It never got rid of it. There are very dark moments, obviously, in American history. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the most progressive amongst us, interned the death. All the Japanese Americans. We somehow got back from that.

Yes, exactly. But like, we needed to have honest conversations afterwards about why that was wrong. And I don't know that a lot of the country is interested in those conversations. Not only that, they're removing those conversations from our historical record. I mean, when you think about- The Smithsonian is going through an audit. It's insane. That's right.

Yeah. But, but, and also they seem very particular concerned with how the country is presented through its racial history. segregation and slavery being, hey, we shouldn't teach that because that's not patriotic or that's not, you know, we are starting to go through different processes, not just with law enforcement, but with the historical records of who we even are. Yeah. And like, look, even the notion that we shouldn't be debating and even now atoning for the sin of slavery, even Thomas Jefferson, who most of the Maga Movement tends to like, you know, famously said, I tremble for. my nation when I reflect that God is just, specifically in reference to slavery. Like, you need to have a serious intellectual honesty and an ability to confront uncomfortable truths to really know and in that knowledge love your country. And that is something that what passes for the

conservative movement today is not willing to do. Well, it's, you know, I do wonder if maybe the answer is, you know, look, it is, there is something appealing about the great man theory. There is something appealing about a hero will rise amongst us. And we always do sort of celebrate that in the United States. You know, Abraham Lincoln, the great man stood up and held the country together through the Civil War. And it does. There's almost a wish fulfillment of, well, maybe the bizarro truer. Trump will rise.

Yeah. And that will be the person. But there's very little faith that the system will self-correct. That's the part that seems highly unlikely. Well, our system has a fundamental flaw. And not to keep going back to the founders, but as a good philosophical, like, Those bastards, what did they do here? No, no, I'm about to praise that.

All right. Fair enough. There was a very clear recognition in all of their writings that the system. that the system we set up is only going to work as long as it is populated by men of virtue. And we don't have that now. I mean, let's expand it to men and women of virtue, obviously. But like, the system was premised on a notion that there would be disinterested selfless patriots who placed the well-being of their country above themselves, which is what patriotism is supposed to. to be. We don't have that. You know, we talked earlier in the podcast about the situation the FBI

found itself in with both Clinton and Trump investigations and how that caused the FBI to lose trust, to lose the American people's trust. It's deeper than that, I think. I think regardless of your political views, in terms of, um, a lack of self-interest and altruism, neither Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump were really exemplars of people who were willing to put aside ambition for the greater good. And we were confronted in that election with two people who thought the rules didn't apply to them. Now, I think in such like Clinton maintaining an email server that's beyond a slightly different order.

Yeah. Right. But like it's different than like getting people to storm the capital to prevent. Exactly. You're talking to a foreign intelligence service. But like it's still indicative of people who thought in some measure admittedly very different degrees that the normal rules that govern politics didn't apply to them. And unfortunately, the only organization that was in a position to push back against either of them was the FBI. And, you know, I will make a much less lofty quote than I have before.

I'm going to quote the tagline for Alien versus Predator. Whoever wins we were going Burke. No, we could. No, no. We're going Weaver? We're going Weaver? Yeah, we're not even Weaver. We're going with one of like the bad knockoff sequels 20 years later.

Like Alien versus Predator, like whoever wins we lose. If Clinton won, there was going to be some form. a retribution for the email investigation. Trump won. There were forms of retribution for the Russia investigation. Like, there was no way the FBI was going to come on of 2016 and its aftermath intact. The only thing I'm amazed about is that nine years later, it's still happening. Right.

And that it's still going. Well, we so appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. I also want to congratulate you. I know that you just had a little baby boy in that. And certainly in this time, you stepping away for a bit. What I should have done is forget about the podcast. Just let you nap for an hour. And that way you'd be ready to go.

I'm sure a couple of years that will be an option. Have you thought about your next sort of step? Have you been in touch with some folks that are still allowed to talk to you? Yeah. So I'm doing a couple things. Like I still, this is going to sound very cliche and cheesy. My oath to the Constitution did not come with an expiration date simply because I left government. So I'm working with a number of organizations that are still fighting for national security at the rule of law and the area of the Venn diagram where those two things connect.

I'm on the advisory committee for a group called Justice Connection, which provides free. legal representation to DOJ and FBI employees who are put in positions because of their political beliefs or has to do something illegal. Right. And I'm going to be starting a fellowship with a website called Lawfare where I'm going to be writing about the same issues for the general public. Right. Well, we certainly appreciate your service over all these years. And definitely find it hard to imagine the injustice of having that all be erased based on, you know, look, it'd be one thing if, you know, they said, you're a spy, but you know, you're friends with a guy we don't like. But we really appreciate being here. Michael Feinberg, former FBI agent, been there for many,

many years and let go for the most ridiculous of reasons. And Devlin Barrett, who we had on, from the New York Times, who reports on these things, was at the DOJ. And, had his connection. I'm going to say mysteriously cut. That's what I'm going to say. I'm going to stick with the deep state ended up cutting Devlin Barrett's feed. And that's why he was no longer. We hope he's okay. That's what I'm going to say. Michael, thanks again. Thanks for having me. All right. Bye-bye. I thought that was excellent, but I have no idea what it's going to sound like because it was like we did an interview with two and and Michael was in like literally at a bris for his newborn son and it turns out at the Department of Justice they have shitty Wi-Fi.

Like there was so much shit going on there. I don't even know. I have no idea what that is going to sound like. No one's doing it like us. Yeah. This is my Super Bowl. Lauren, this is I like and by the way, for the people at home like they've got three hours. Like they've got Nicole, Rob, Lauren, like they've got three hours to make this thing sound like something coherent.

Superstar team. It really is. It is a superstar team. I feel so badly for Michael, like talk about a like warrior philosopher dude, like quoting Weber and Burke and on the line and removed because he still. is friendly with a guy they don't like. I love how he thought he was the first person to wax poetic about John Locke on this podcast. Sir, you have no idea. You do not know what you're dealing with, my friend.

But he's one of the few guys who had quoted, I guess it was Weber, but then also where did he pull up? Was it something from Star Wars or was that me? Oh, yeah, Alien versus Predator. Alien versus Predator. Rolling Stones, Alien versus Predator. Like that is a dude. If he had been in your dorm in college, you'd have just been like, I want us to sit here forever. A deep thinker.

I don't, I don't ever, I don't know what's going to happen when the gummy wears off. But right now, you're my favorite person in the world. All good stuff. Brittany, before we go off for summer, is there anything anybody wants to know before we're we're gone there always there is all right what are they got john what lessons should chuck schumer learn from joe baden's decision not to step aside earlier exactly that's exactly right schumer has to learn that you got to stay in there no matter what until one day you look up and the angels are either dragging you towards the light or towards the darkness and that is the only way

that from now on, you can only be removed from the Senate or our government by the great claw arm in the sky that dips. It's what his nipples are for. It comes down. They grab them both on the nipple and pull him out of the machine. You might not be far off. We're about to get an octagon at the White House.

You never know. Day, man, July 4th. It's not, America can't celebrate. It's glorious history without two people beating the shit out of each other in the Rose Garden. It is going to be Chuck Schumer. I mean, there was recently, I think a senator, might have been Dick Durbin, who was like, I've made the decision not to run anymore, like 82.

And everybody was like, wow, that's incredible. Like a guy stepping away in his mid-80s. Amazing. Why leave so early, young man? You know, it's like when you read about like an NFL player being like, I've decided to retire at 25. Just fucking crazy. What else they got?

What else they got? Do you watch Fox News? Do you have a favorite show? Do I watch Fox News? Look at me. Look! Is this? Would this happen to some... Do you think this erosion happens naturally?

You think this is just wind, sun, and rain? No. This is the corrosive acid rain that flows from... from America's newsroom on a daily basis and has, look, look, look. That's the Jesse Waters glow, I think it's that. This is what happens to a human being

who is exposed to that level of radiation. John's skincare routine is the five. All right, you guys are going to have a good rest of the summer? You can enjoy yourselves? What do we got, like three weeks off? Yeah. We'll be back this second week in September. You guys have crushed it this year, my friends.

Please, you've earned a wonderful vacation. All of you. I hope you all have a great time and come back. Nice and crisp and ready to go. Brittany, how can they keep in touch with us while we're all gone? Twitter, we are weekly show pod, Instagram threads, TikTok, Blue Sky. We are weekly show podcast. And you can like, subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel,

the weekly show with John Stewart. All right. lead producer Lauren Walker, producer Brittany Mamedevick, video editor and engineer Rob Vitol, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce, researcher and associate producer Jillian Speer, and our executive producers, Chris McShane and Katie Gray. Guys, fantastic job. As always, have a wonderful summer break, and I look forward to seeing everybody in September. Talk to you guys soon.

Bye, bye. The weekly show with John Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Bus Boy Productions.