Lawfare Daily: Inside the Upheaval of the Second Trump Administration with Emily Bazelon

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Humans make mistakes. The genitive AI can outperform and reach super human levels of performance. We get ourselves tied up in knots about-- or we can't analyze the algorithm--

“where what we really need to do is analyze the output”

and compare it to how good humans would be at that task. Stay informed and stay ahead with a ThinkEhead podcast from London Business School. [MUSIC PLAYING] What it came down to was, instead of being someone who

is a fact fighter and who pursues the facts of investigation wherever they go, I am being told what the completion is at advance. And I'm also, in some cases, being told who to target. And that is just wildly at odds with how

the justice department and the FBI are supposed to operate. It's the law fair podcast. I'm Tyler McBrion, managing editor of Law Fair, with Emily Bazelong, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. The Truman Capote fellow for Creative Writing

in Law at Yale Law School. And the co-host of Slates Weekly Podcast, political gab vest. The threat now has much less to do with conservative liberal divides and much more to do with just straight up,

like what is the rule of law mean in the United States is the justice department, simply a weapon that the president pulls out of his pocket to inflict damage on anyone he wants or to do favors for anyone he wants.

Today, we're talking about three ambitious stories published over the past few months by Emily and her New York Times colleagues. In this trilogy of oral histories, they spoke with dozens and dozens of current and former

government employees at the DOJ FBI and DHS, about their experiences navigating the upheaval

of the second-tubbing administration from the inside.

So Emily, I wanted to start with just a bit of the backstory behind this, these package of oral history, ambitious stories that you and colleagues have done at The New York Times on first, the unraveling of the Justice Department. And then there was a deep dive on Cash Patels FBI

and then most recently a piece called The View from Inside DHS. So I'm curious, as I said, about the backstory. What motivated these stories and also how you decided to cover them? I mean, it's quite an ambitious project to spoke with dozens

and dozens of former and current government employees. So why this big deployment of editorial resources

“at the times to cover it the way that you and your colleagues did?”

- Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for having me. Thanks so much for your interested in these stories. I have been writing about the Justice Department for a long time

and before Trump took office for a second time

before the election, when still a question, whether, of course, he would be elected, I reached out to 50 former top Justice Department officials. So people who had been the attorney general or the solicitor general or roles like that

or slightly lower, going back to Ronald Reagan. And at that point, what I was doing with a colleague Matt Schwartz was trying to look at what these people thought was going to happen if Trump was reelected. We had survey questions for them.

We did a lot of false interviews and it was a group of 50 that was half democratic appointees and half Republican appointees. They were quite concerned for kind of rule of law consequences before the election.

And then we went back to them afterward, like six months in and said, how do you think things are going? And they said poorly. And some of them said even more poorly than we expected.

And in working on that second piece,

I realized that there was this giant pool of people who I was even more interested in hearing from. And those are the people who had worked in the Justice Department when Trump took office. They were there for parts of the first year and change.

And they were career attorneys. They were people who are not political appointees like my 50 top officials. They work from administration to administration. And they're very used to the idea that when a new president

comes in, there are some policy priorities that change. So I wondered, what does that look like from their point of view?

and other DOJ attorneys who are still at the department

to talk to the press.

“They're usually not authorized to do that.”

They're also kind of professionally allergic to it. But some of them were willing to talk off the record. And then there were a lot of people who had left for a variety of reasons. Some of them were horrified and resigned.

But some of them had just retired in the normal course of one's career. And so we started reaching out to those people and got a pretty surprisingly open response. There were lots of lawyers who'd left who were really eager

to talk about what they'd experienced. And the story that they really wanted to tell was one about why this administration was so different, not because they were liberals who like thought it was really bad that Trump was trying to root out

DI.

More that they just were fundamentally concerned

about these kind of core principles of the independence of the Justice Department from the White House. So that was how it started. That story from the point of view of dozens of DOJ attorneys got a big response.

And then my boss, Jake Silverstein, was like, well, maybe we should keep going. Like maybe we should do other parts of other agencies. And so with my fabulous colleague Rachel Pozer, we set off to learn much more about the FBI,

which is obviously as a component of the Justice Department but has its own set of agents and analysts and executives. And then the DHS story, the Department of Homeland Security kind of followed as the last part of this trilogy.

Yeah, well, I mean, there's a lot to dig into here.

“But one thing that you mentioned is I think the reason”

that I was so drawn to these stories, which is this question that I've been asking myself a lot of people asking themselves of this current administration with so much tumult and new stories every day. How much of it is continuity?

Or just the regular changing of the guard between administrations and how much is truly rupture, truly unprecedented. So before we get into the substance of what you found and heard from these current and former government employees,

I want to touch on just something that you mentioned, which is just the fact that so many people at institutions like the FBI talk to you at all. Could you speak a bit more about your experience reaching out to these sources?

And what it says about the current state of affairs that so many people, specifically at the FBI, that at the other agencies as well, just were willing to talk to you, a journalist. Yeah, I mean, the fact that so many people were willing

to talk to us was a cry of alarm. It was in itself like an act of desperation for the reasons you say. The way we went about the reporting, I mean, mostly, it was like we would find one person

and we would say like, who else do you know who might be willing to talk to us? Like it was very word of mouth, kind of peace mail, it took weeks to break through.

Sometimes I was in despair, like we would never reach

enough people, Rachel was much more common upbeat so I give her lots of credit for that. We also designed surveys that were basically reporting tools where we are trying to get answers to some basic questions, like basically what do you think is different

or how different do you think this is? Like how much is this continuity versus change? And then we would ask people who filled out the survey if we could get in touch with them. And so that was another way that we reached out

to a lot of people for the first story we got help from a group called Justice Connection, which has sprung up to represent people who've left the Justice Department and they were super helpful in helping us find people.

Then the FBI Agent Association helped a bit. We never really found that kind of group for DHS. - I wanna get into what you heard and what you found. Again, we can take any one of the three in the trilogy or most curious about similarities

that you've heard across the agencies and then differences. But just speaking broadly, what are some things that have really stuck with you now that we were several months after the publication of the Justice Department piece, the FBI piece,

“I should say I believe was published in January”

and then in April came the DHS piece, just throwing it open, what is stuck with you from these many, many hours of conversations? - Yeah, so there were sort of different layers of the story. So one thing that I like was important was

the way that telling a story chronologically 'cause we used the calendar to tell the story, doing it that way allowed us to kind of see the arc of the narrative and connect dots. And also, I think for me, it was there's so much news

every day, like we're just blasted with all this news and maybe it's unprecedented or we use the word unusual a time in this Trump administration era. But how did the events stack up against each other? What, if you worked for the government

and you're looking back over the year,

So those were the things we were trying to answer. And the layers I was talking about,

“so one layer was like the sort of game of thrones drama”

that was going on at the top of the agency, right? You have at the Justice Department, you have first, a meal buffet come in as like, and he wasn't called the acting attorney general, but he was the acting deputy attorney general

and he was like running the show. And that was bananas from the point of view who of people who worked there, right? That's like the Justice Department effectively ignoring Judge Boseburg's orders to turn the planes around,

lots of other, like really things that had never happened

before that seemed like really a threat to the kind of rule of law and the government's being legal agency following the law. Then, at the FBI, you have Cache Patel, another like larger than life character, working for Pam Bondi, who is like her own soap opera,

and then there was a version of this with Christy Nome at the Department of Homeland Security. And in each instance, the things we heard the most about the drama at the top from executives,

“like people who were there on the scene, working with these people,”

who were just like, they kind of couldn't believe what was happening. Sometimes it was misuse of government resources, like, you know, planes, Christy Nome, like insisting on getting her blanket back

and firing someone.

Sometimes they were firing people

and then hiring them back the next day 'cause actually like they had to have someone who had these skills. But in every instance, it was both malevolence and then also just like kind of a clown car.

And so that was striking. And then, you know, the bigger question for me, I tend to be like the more nerdy storyteller, was like, what's actually changing on the ground? So like, how are you handling cases in a way

that you wouldn't have before? And for the Justice Department lawyers, a lot of it had, and this was truth, the FBI too. A lot of what it came down to was, instead of being someone who is a fact-finder

and who pursues the facts of investigation wherever they go. I am being told what the conclusion is in advance. And I'm also, in some cases, being told who to target. And that is like just wildly at odds

with how the Justice Department and the FBI are supposed to operate. And so then the next question became okay, like when orders like that are happening around you, are they being carried out, how are people trying to, you know, in some instances resist?

“But also, like, are you seeing the people you work with?”

At least some of them really be complicit in this perversion of the Justice Department's principles? - Yeah, I mean, as you were speaking so many wild details that I remember reading, came to mind. I believe it was the DHS story where there was one,

you know, long time DHS veteran who I think was driving his daughter to college in a U-Haul who had taken the time off to do that. And it wasn't available for one quick thing and then was, similarly, fire the next day.

And there's just so many of these details, many of which our listeners will be familiar with because we'll, I'm sure many of them have already read this package of stories, but a lot of the details have been reported elsewhere.

But what I, what was really, I think, valuable about this piece was as you said, getting the narrative to just this chronology, just being reminded of how all of these things happened in the sequence, but then also what people were thinking about these details that we heard.

You know, we don't get these quotes in a typical feature or news story, the way that you laid them out. So I wanted to ask you about, you know, details that you got that you actually can't even put in the story in terms of body language or the way people said things.

Or I don't know if there was like sentiments that you picked up on that don't really translate to the page well, remorse or confusion. Those types of things. - I mean, agitation is one feeling that I would get from these calls.

So I spent a long time like three hours laid on a Friday on the film with someone who is not quoted in the story at all because they decided they could not be. But they were at the end of the three hours, which was about the beginning of the Trump administration.

They were like, that was like therapy.

And I'm not a therapist, so that always makes me nervous,

but I think this feeling was like, I have not gotten a chance to pour out this whole story because some of this like maybe, you know, my close friends or family wouldn't understand. And some of it, like I'm just really not supposed to be talking

about, but here I am, you know, talking to a journalist who has said like this can be off the record unless you give me permission to use this material. And so it just like sort of all poured out. That was like a frequent emotion.

we talked to people from CR 15,

“which was this elite corruption fighting squad in the FBI.”

And these are people who, they're at the pinnacle of their skills and of their careers. And their whole ethos is, we address public corruption by a government official and we investigate Democrats, we investigate Republicans, like we just go

where we think the dirt is. And also like we're careful, we don't, you know, open an investigation or pursue it unless like we think there's something there.

And they just got completely creamed by the second Trump

administration because they had been the ones who, in many cases, had looked into the criminal allegations against Trump himself, right, relating to not giving the documents back at Mara Logo and to January six, like they were the people assigned to Jack Smith,

the special prosecutor. And because they had done that work, they kind of had to be destroyed. Like not just fired and they were fired, but also just like ripped into an on social media.

Chuck Grassley, the Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee kind of seemed to be making like a special priority out of dismantling and wrecking their careers personally. And that is like totally against the ethos of the FBI.

You're not supposed to be getting in trouble in a future administration for something you did for a passive administration because as the agents kept saying to us, like, how does anyone take a sensitive assignment politically if they're just going to get

ripped to shreds the next time around? And then also, you know, as they are being wrecked across the coal, it's cash-patel then just dispans the whole unit. And so there is no more CR-15.

And there's very little public corruption prosecution going on, except where it suits the political partisan interests of the Trump administration. So seeing all of that through the eyes of the people who are deeply committed to their work

and then personally affected by it, that has stuck with me. - So many of these stories appear to me, at least, to be a pretty straight line one to one of retaliation against perceived persecution of Trump himself, but also it's part of a wider strategy

of this early strategy of dismantling oversight mechanisms both within, you know, throughout the executive branch. What other strategies did you see that were fairly standard across all three of these stories?

I mean, again, the FBI is part of the DOJ, but so I guess across the DOJ and DHS,

“there's been just a lot of, I think, discourse”

about the personnel strategy, the Russ vote, OMB strategy

of the second Trump administration to become,

to be a lot more effective in carrying out its agenda, norms and institutions be damned. So, yeah, what other similarities did you see in terms of the strategy of dismantling, rebuilding in their own image, and then, you know, similarly,

the differences there between DOJ and DHS? - Well, so many people had stories about immigration enforcement, right? And this was like from different vantage points. So, normally, there's just one part of the justice department

called the Office of Immigration Litigation that does immigration work at main justice. And normally, the FBI is very little to do with immigration enforcement, but everyone's getting dragged in because this is the priority, you know,

for the FBI, cash betel keeps insisting on saying, like, let cops be cops by the way, some, like, FBI agents and analysts are not cops. They don't consider themselves cops. They, like, the cops are great.

We love the cops, they do something different from us. We do, you know, more long-term, like, investigations, they do cop on the Beat Street work.

Nope, now, you know, a third of the resources

of the FBI are going into enforcement and DOJ lawyers are getting pulled into it all over the country because, of course, then there are all these detentions and people challenging their detentions by bringing habeas, petitions, and federal court.

And ICE attorneys are not the people who show up in federal court, like, they show up in immigration court. So that is, like, a crisis of manpower, really.

“And I think, like, morality for a lot of US attorney's”

offices around the country. Then, of course, we are to be on immigration enforcement from the point of view of the people in the Department of Homeland Security. Normally, that is ICE's internal interior

immigration enforcement is the work of ICE. But again, no, everybody's doing it. Border patrol officers who normally are on the border are being pulled into cities like Chicago and Minneapolis, which they're not trained to do.

Like, they don't know how to handle street protests, or even really do the kind of, like, house enforcement that ICE agents do. And so that's making all of those activities,

And then, also, even the people who work for, what's called USCIS, and that's citizenship and immigration services. Those are the people who work on, like, benefits and services for legal immigrants.

They're also being called an enforcement bureau, all of a sudden.

And basically, being turned toward addressing fraud,

which is not a huge thing, actually, in immigration work,

“but, like, suddenly, it's the only thing anyone cares about.”

And, you know, the work they were doing to that asylum and refugee applications is all on hold. So, it just threw into turmoil, the kind of daily operations of so many public servants and government workers, like, this move toward immigration enforcement.

Which, of course, the interior part of it has been, like, deeply unpopular and actually a big problem, politically, for the Trump administration, even though, securing the border has been a success, politically. Global Chiefs are redefining business.

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I'm curious about some of the Ice Agents first come to mind,

but anyone really you spoke to who were not so disgruntled. They were actually a supportive of these changes of policies, to put it lightly, or maybe they agreed with the strategy but not the tactics and things like that. Could you speak about some of those people?

Yeah, I mean, mostly both of those points of view, we heard a lot of the latter one.

“I think there are lots of Ice Agents who are fully on board”

for what's happening, especially the people who've been hired more recently, like they are coming into this job. And frankly, those people are probably less interested in talking to the New York Times. So I don't claim that I have a representative sample by any means.

Our vantage point was people who were like, yeah, I'm down for the goal of enforcement, like I signed up for this, but the way this is happening is bad. And it's not gonna help anyone because, like, you know, people, I mean, this was, we were talking to people in the aftermath of the

killings in Minneapolis of our native good in Alex Pretty, and Ice in Border Patrol Agents who were in Minneapolis or in other cities were like, this is terrible. Like, this is making it harder for us to do our work. They were very concerned about the racial profiling that they saw

happening from other Ice Agents.

And they were saying things like, well, we would never do this.

Or like, I didn't do that. Or, you know, I stopped this guy. It was a dad. And he started crying. And there's his kid in the back seat.

And I was like, dude, just like, get your papers together and get out of here. And I let him go. But other people wouldn't have done that. Now, of course, like, that might not be the whole story,

but it was pretty interesting. And I guess really not surprising to me that people would feel very uncomfortable, at least sometimes, being in that role and want to try to distance themselves from it. Yeah, there was quite a bit of cognitive

dissonance that jumped out at me, as I said earlier, remorse and confusion. And, you know, as easy as it is from the outside to have this this knee jerk reaction that people often have when you hear Trump voters saying, you know, I didn't vote for this.

“Even though it was well telegraphed, I think during the campaign,”

there's still so much nuance that I think this approach brings. So, I think one example is, you know, these reactions to the public protests that were happening then especially in Minneapolis. But another example is just at times this sort of dark humor

that some people are using to cope with these changes or this story that stuck with me, which was that there was a rumor I believe going around at DHS that Corey Lewandowski was walking from desk to desk and if anyone was missing, he just removed their name plates

so people were sticking sticky notes on their desk saying, out to lunch or like, be back in ten, going to the restroom. You know, what, what are those like more human elements like stuck with you? It just does such a good job putting a human face to the people

who make up our institutions. Yeah, I mean, you know, we didn't write about this as much as people talked about it, but the fear of being part of these riffs, these reductions in force and losing your job was incredibly palpable and I think remains.

But like, especially early on, you know, like, do just showing up.

People also told us that like, they were taking the back stairs instead of the elevator to try to avoid Corey Lewandowski. Like, people were just trying really hard to keep their heads down and doing things if they were in any kind of management position

to try to protect the people who worked for them, including in some ways like doing some,

“I think things that their colleagues found really questionable.”

So like, people told us on being on calls, where all of a sudden at USCIS, you're supposed to be looking for fraud. And so, you know, some layer said, "Well, actually, my superior was like making a town

like fraud was a real thing so that we could go fight fraud and that was going to supposedly save our division." But like, it was bullshit. We knew there was hardly any fraud and then they cut the whole division anyway.

You know, you can sort of see,

I think like, it always, it seems from the outside

and a kind of Hollywood way that it's clear when you're crossing a moral line. And like, yes, you're going to have resigned. And you know, we did talk to people who had like those total moments of clarity and they walked out the door

and you listening, I thought like, I hope that I would behave this way if it was me. And then you hear about things that, or in a kind of gray area,

or people are presenting them as being in a gray area. And you think, like, yeah, you know, it is really hard to give up your job that you've worked really hard for.

“And I had this feeling too of deep appreciation”

for the Civil Service. You know, like, a lot of these people are really smart and they could be doing a lot of things and they're giving their lives to government work. And like, there are some great benefits of that.

It's more secure. It's interesting often. It's not like they were suffering, but they had choices. And they made these professional choices,

which like they really think of as being for the good of the country. And in so many cases, it just turned out that the people they were working for had zero.

Like, thought they were worthless. I mean, one of the people who got who left the FBI, Tania Eugora. It's she was like the director of the director of intelligence.

So like the chief analyst, you know, dealing with intelligence. And she came, when when cash paternal came into office, she was like, I really want to set him up for success. Like, how does he want these briefings?

Okay, he's a more visual guy. We're going to do it that way. And then she ended up getting blamed for something she hadn't even done. And they just like completely sideline

to her. And she was just like, I felt like I was a disposable, used up piece of cleanaxe. And I think there was just a lot of that.

And it's not good for the like institutional future of these agencies. Yeah, story after story are people who were disposed of fired quite impulsively often or just were fed up and had to resign.

But short of that, did you pick up on other forms of resistance

“if you want to call it that or pushback or descent?”

There was a lot of fear. And there was a chilling effect as a result. But there also seemed to be some, at least some small episodes of pushback. And that could come in the form of just insisting

on what the actual policy is and insisting on working within the law. But yeah, and any anecdotes there that stuck out to you. Yeah, I mean we talked to a bunch of people

in the civil rights division of the Justice Department, which has been completely cleaned out, right? I think the last time I checked 70% of the lawyers had left the career attorneys

is really higher at this point. And from their point of view, it's like, I mean, what is this civil rights division history?

It arises in the early 60s as like champion of black civil rights in the south and there's this famous picture of one of the early heroes of the civil rights division. John Dor standing with James Meredith,

the first black student who's trying to integrate

I think the University of Mississippi. And that's its fabled history. And like now, it is supposed to be really concerned with reverse discrimination against white people

and quote anti-Semitism. And I say that as a Jewish person who cares a lot about real anti-Semitism, but these lawyers had been sent to the University of California schools and told that they were supposed to find

like a lot of evidence of anti-Semitism. And they, you know, went in in good faith and they interviewed a whole bunch of people and they were like, "Okay, well,

you know, it is true that there were like a few instances of faculty getting kind of harassed at UCLA." But the rest of this like, "No, this is, you know,

we need to have free speech on campus and people have to be able to criticize Israel." And this is much of what we're being told to look into, like does not rise to level of a civil rights violation.

And certainly not a billion dollars worth in damages,

which is what they were supposed to come up with. And so they, you know, they were nervous. They were like writing up their notes every day

so that there would be a clear record of what they were doing. Trying to make it really clear like we're trying as hard as we can to find this evidence you want and it's not there.

in a very non-loyer-like setting, not quitting, but also like not doing the thing that for them across the line. And you know, I do want to say like,

“I think there are lots of instances in which”

I totally understood why people resigned or quit like, yes, but I also think we need to make room for the idea that some people have stayed. And they are like trying to do the best they can and also thinking that you know,

whoever replaces them is going to be much worse. So I feel like there's you know, a way to justify all of those kinds of decisions depending on like what you personally are being asked to do and what the conditions of your employment are.

I wonder if you've also had this this challenge of covering this current administration where there's so much chaos and so much damage. Deaths have happened in detention centers in, you know, on the streets. But then on the other,

and for some, you know, communities in the US, the chaos in the district and that the damage is very apparent and very everyday. But for other parts of the country, you know,

if you weren't reading the headlines, you may think that, you know, the government may be there's some problems, some dysfunction,

there's always this function,

but there's still a government, you know, the sun's still rising and setting every day. So, you know, I guess what I want to ask is,

is your experience, you know, covering this administration versus Trump one, or even just past administrations, and how your idea of our institutions has changed or not.

So, you know, Trump won up until January 6, there was a lot of discussion about how our institutions may have been brought to the brink, but they held, you know,

there was no constitutional crisis, no coup, no successful coup, but now, you know, Trump too looks very different in a lot of ways,

and the institutions have changed much more dramatically than the first time around. So, how have you, you know, compared your experiences now versus Trump one,

or other administrations in terms of these, this like institutional angle? Yeah, I mean, I would say that like, in Trump one and then afterwards,

I spent a lot of time thinking about, like,

“what does it mean to say norms have crumbled or been violating?”

And I got like actually really tired of the whole concept of norms, because norms are really strong until like someone decides, I don't care about them anymore, and then they seem to be able to be tossed out the window. And so,

I felt like that happened to a degree in Trump one, but then there were these moments where like, you know, truly were we going to have, you know,

basically a coup in the Justice Department where Trump was going to direct,

or find people to direct the Justice Department to investigate these, completely made up allegations of, you know, voter fraud connected with the 2020 election to allow him to stand to office. Like,

that was the play, and he tried to pull it off, and there was enough resistance that it didn't happen. And he knew that, and he was furious,

like Bill Barr, who second attorney general with whom he had lots of common ground, like Bill Barr had a super conservative agenda, and he was on board for a lot. But he was not on board for,

essentially violating his oath of office to keep Donald Trump in office. And so he resigned, and the people he left behind also, almost entirely said,

like, nope, we're not doing this, and Trump backed off, and the conclusion Trump drew from that was like,

screw these people, like these are some super annoying lawyers who don't know how to get to yes.

“And I think we see in the current Justice Department,”

that like, 90% Pam Bondi got to yes, and 150% Todd Blanch, the current acting attorney general gets to yes. You know,

to me, this, the one point, almost $8 billion, slush fund,

is like the epitome of all this. I mean, this is just unthinkable, some Trump's who's the IRS, the Justice Department gets,

like, I don't even use the word, persuade, agrees to drop, agrees in exchange for Trump,

again, the law suit, to create this huge fund that's going to pay off, all these people who it says were victims, in air quotes of the Biden administration's prosecutions,

and also Trump gets effectively a civil pardon

that he'll never be investigated,

nor his family or business for any tax questions. And the fund, I mean, if it goes where it's supposed to go, is basically probably could pay for a lot of people who were,

you know, at the capital rioting on January 6th, 2021, maybe they can use the money to like come back in 2028,

if they're called upon. I mean, that's like really what we're talking about. And I don't think that the Trump won top of the Justice Department would have gone along with that,

and that's a very meaningful distinction. Now, I mean, I had a lot of quarrels with the Trump one, Justice Department,

but not this,

you know,

and we're just at a different level,

and we're just going to think that the threat now has much less to do with conservative liberal divides,

“and much more to do with just straight up like what is the rule of law?”

I mean, in the United States, is the Justice Department, you know, simply a weapon that the President pulls out of his pocket

to inflict damage on anyone he wants, or to do favors for anyone he wants. And, and that's the thing that I think is like the most different, and there's been a huge amount of damage,

and it's going to be a giant task to repair it. Well, speaking of that, how do we repair it? I mean,

I will preface this question by saying, you know, I think journalists often get, they articulate a problem so well, they diagnose it so well,

and then they're expected to offer, like an answer of what's due next. And we are at a high altitude, but yeah,

I don't know if there are any lessons that you've heard from people,

or that you've come to on your own after all this reporting, with all of these norms, trampled, can we even talk about rebuilding, or should we talk about building something new

in these institutions? Yeah, how do we fix it? Well, I think we should, since so much of it is like all burned down,

“I think we should use the opportunity to build something”

stronger and newer, right? Like, it's not like it was perfect before. I think that some of the norms that the country has relied on,

for the kind of independence that the Justice Department had on criminal investigations from the White House needs to be in a statute. Like, it needs to be a law. It needs to be the president is breaking a law,

not just like deciding not to respect norm anymore. And that's going to be important. And I think like some of it, you will be able to figure it out. I mean,

it's not totally straightforward

because the attorney general does work for the president, right? And like that, lots of countries struggle with this question of like the chief law enforcement officer. How does that person relate to the chief executive?

Are they completely under the authority of the chief executive? And if not, to whom are they accountable? Like, to elect them separately,

what do you do about that? Because they need to be accountable. They can't just be like some giant inquisitor out there independently. Those caveats said,

“"Do think that you could have some statutory independence”

written in that is important." And I also think that there are so many people who've left who are dying to come back and rebuild and there are huge resource. I mean, they have to be invited back

and they have to be able to come in and have authority over some of the people who've stayed and been complicit. And some of the people who've stayed and been complicit or who've really like,

you know, been part of the problem, they need to leave. That kind of big sort, like I don't envy whoever has to figure that out

and they're going to make some mistakes along the way inevitably. But I do take heart from the fact that a lot of the people I talk to would love nothing more than to be able

to come back and fix things. And I've been heartened by, this is completely anecdotal, but conversations I've had with 3Ls in law school and others

who still very much, you know, currently, who still very much intend to and want to go work for the federal government. And so, yeah,

at least that's been hardening, that hasn't completely turned everyone off of this kind of work of the civil service.

As we near the end of the conversation here, I'm curious, as much as you're able to divulge of where this reporting project is going next.

Are you looking at another agency? Are you, yeah, where is this project headed? I am currently on book leave,

writing a book about women's health and freedom, a lot about abortion and birth control, that is totally different from this project. So I don't know the answer.

The magazine did a great story by Jeanine Interlandi, one of my colleagues on the CDC that used to this oral history format, and I do think,

like, there are some obvious ripe targets in other parts of the government for this, and I'd be happy to work on that when I come back, but right now I'm distracted.

I guess, another thing I'll just bring up, and I have written some about this too, but, you know,

the district courts have played such an important role in all of this, like, the attorneys and other government employees who are trying to resist,

like, often those, their work requires a federal judge to weigh in on one side of the other, and the fact that,

for the most part, the district courts have been so stalwart in, and thoughtful, right, in just looking at these questions from

a nonpartisan legal perspective, has been essential. It doesn't mean the Trump has lost all the time, nor should he lose all the time. It just means that it looks like a lot of judges,

no matter who appointed them, are really concerned that the government followed the law.

like,

we can rely on in the short,

but not the long term, right? It takes a while for the kind of turnover of the federal courts to have it, them really corrupted.

And so that's part of, I think, why this has been maybe the strongest, certainly the strongest part of the government, that part of our democracy,

maybe the strongest institution, like, just writ large at all.

“But it's also important to remember that it's,”

it can't last forever, because if you have bad actors who are presidents appointing judges, then at some point, like the judiciary is going to curdle

in much the way the top leadership of the Justice Department has.

Here's the thing I want to add.

I want to make sure to say that, you know, we went, we asked for comment from the Justice Department, the FBI, DHS, we sent lots of questions,

a fact checker sent, like, a million questions. And I should say, like,

top line, all of these agencies, very much objected to these stories, you know, questioned the New York Times's,

objectivity, and also questioned all of our sources, and basically said, like, all of this is bullshit,

that was sort of the top-line response. And, you know,

“and then when they had more specific responses,”

to actual facts along the way, we tried to include them wherever we could. So I just want to make it clear that like the Trump administration does not think that we were telling a true story.

We corroborated everything we had. We made sure we had multiple sources. We took that part of the reporting very seriously. Yes, very important to add.

And, you know, if this conversation has indicated anything, it's the immense amount of work that you and your colleagues put into this. So thank you for your reporting to you and your colleagues. I mean,

this is really like,

first draft of history stuff to use an old cliché,

but it's really invaluable. And thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to discuss it. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to think about it all,

“even though it is a dark first draft of history,”

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