Where Tyranny Begins: The Justice Department, the FBI, and the War on Democracy

by David Rohde Narrated by Eric Jason Martin

Overview

Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump intimidated, silenced, and bent to his will Justice Department and FBI officials. He sowed public doubt in both agencies so successfully that when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, he paid little political cost and, despite an unprecedented array of criminal indictments, easily won the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election.



In Where Tyranny Begins, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Rohde investigates the strategies Trump systematically used to turn the country's two most powerful law-enforcement agencies into his personal political weapons. Rohde also reveals how, during the Biden years, Justice Department non-partisan 1970s norms that Attorney General Merrick Garland reinforced inadvertently helped Trump, and could fail to deliver a trial and legal accountability by Election Day 2024.



Where Tyranny Begins exposes how ill-suited both the DOJ and FBI are to serve as checks on abuses of presidential power. A round of historic reforms equivalent to the post-Watergate reforms that stabilized American democracy in the 1970s are immediately needed. A five-word warning coined by the English philosopher John Locke in 1689 captures the stakes in 2024: "Where-ever law ends, tyranny begins."

Editorial Reviews

Andrea Bernstein

"Where Tyranny Begins, like all of David Rohde’s work, is deeply sourced and thoroughly researched. It raises the reader above the never-ending assault of headlines to a compelling narrative that sheds light, at last, on the Justice Department’s struggles to reckon with Donald Trump."

Kirkus Reviews

2024-05-04
A meticulous chronicle of the excruciating details of the battles between the Trump presidency and the Department of Justice.

In a hard-hitting book characterized by careful research and documentation, two-time Pulitzer winner Rohde, author of In Deep and Endgame, delineates how the Trump White House violated well-established post-Watergate norms about judicial conduct, upending and devaluing the work of the DOJ. The trajectory of the successful attempts to sway judicial philosophy started in the first week of Trump’s presidency, as he instituted the Muslim travel ban, an executive decision that went straight to the courts. Subsequently, the new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, a Trump loyalist—caught lying about meeting a Russian ambassador when he was running Trump’s campaign—recused himself from running the investigation into Russian interference, a monumental decision that would lead to Trump turning against him. After Trump fired FBI director James Comey, deputy AG Rod Rosenstein felt compelled to choose the highly revered former FBI director Robert Mueller to run the special counsel on Russia. However, Trump’s repeated attacks on the department and its officials weakened the ability of the special counsel team to make its case to the public. Moreover, the new AG, William Barr, publicly misrepresented Mueller’s conclusion two years later as proving there was “no collusion” with the Russians, when Mueller’s report was actually more damning. The new scandals over the phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, along with the investigation into Hunter Biden and the commuting of Roger Stone and Michael Flynn’s sentences, all resulted in “myriad Justice Department and post-Watergate norms…shredded by Trump and Barr with seemingly little political consequence.” The resulting situation, Rohde argues convincingly, cannot be rectified by the cautious proceedings of Biden’s AG, Merrick Garland.

A cautionary, relevant study of systematic executive bullying that has cast deep skepticism on law enforcement in America.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940191961309
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	08/27/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged