Justice Denied: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice Department - Hardcover

Leonnig, Carol; Davis, Aaron

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593831373 ISBN 13: 9780593831373

Verlag: Penguin Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

From Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis, a jaw-dropping investigation into the fundamental manipulation and miscarriage of the Justice Department’s mission over the last eight years, culminating in the 2024 presidential election, which will determine if the institution and the rule of law for which it once stood survives.

For four years, former President Donald Trump weaponized the Department of Justice against his enemies, decimating what is meant to be an apolitical institution, and turning the nation’s top law enforcement agency into an attack dog for his personal and political causes. By the time President Biden was sworn in, he and his new Attorney General Merrick Garland had inherited a DOJ thrown into dysfunction and a defensive crouch by Trump’s lieutenants. Many long-serving employees had been forced out, or resigned in protest, leaving the department ill-prepared for the January 6th insurrection, an assault on the Capitol as well as democracy itself.

In Justice Denied, Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis expose not only the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine Justice at every turn, but how Garland’s struggle to restore the American public’s perception of the DOJ resulted in catastrophic missteps and mistakes, defanging the institution entrusted with defending democracy. The most damaging decision of all might be Garland and his team’s 15-month delay to launch a formal investigation into Trump and his allies’ efforts to steal the 2020 election. Leonnig and Davis disclose how the department’s wariness over appearing partisan and internal clashes all but assured the former president would not face trial on federal charges he abused the nation’s highest office before he sought to retake the White House in 2024.

With sources deeply embedded in both the Trump and Biden administrations, and past and present employees of the DOJ, Leonnig and Davis reveal exactly how an institution built to shore up the rule of law instead shrunk away from that duty and Trump’s propaganda machine. Consequentially, they illustrate how special counsel Jack Smith faced an impossible race against the clock to build a case of conspiracy against a former president and current nominee, who if he wins has pledged to use the DOJ to imprison his opponents, including President Biden. Justice Denied is a shocking account of exactly what is happening behind the scenes of the Justice Department, of the heroes within the organization still battling for the rule of law, and a call to action for those who still believe in liberty and justice for all.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Carol Leonnig is a national investigative reporter at The Washington Post, where she has worked since 2000, covering Donald Trump’s presidency and previous administrations. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on security failures and misconduct inside the Secret Service. She also was part of the Post teams awarded Pulitzers in 2018, for reporting on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, and in 2014, for revealing the U.S. government’s secret, broad surveillance of Americans. Leonnig is an on-air contributor to NBC News and MSNBC, the coauthor of A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America, and the author of Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service.

Aaron Davis is an investigative reporter who joined The Washington Post as a staff writer in 2008. He has covered local, state and federal government, as well as the aviation industry and law enforcement. Davis shared in winning the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 2018.

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[1]

A Righteous Prosecution?

In 2018, a week before Thanksgiving, Kamil Shields and David Kent-two federal prosecutors who worked in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia-were losing sleep over high-level interference in their criminal case. It was shocking to them, they confided to colleagues, but the person imperiling a fair prosecution was their ultimate boss, the president of the United States.

Outside the legal community, the work of federal prosecutors such as Kent and Shields has often not been well understood. They were cogs in a network of ninety-three U.S. Attorney's Offices, which fan out across the country from the Department of Justice's main headquarters in Washington, D.C. Together, the attorneys in those offices form a field army that, since President George Washington's first appointments to such posts, has been charged with carefully investigating crimes and pursuing justice on behalf of the U.S. government. Shields and Kent were on the front lines, and their assignment was among the department's most sensitive. Secretly, they were probing one of the government's highest-ranking law enforcement chiefs, Andrew McCabe, who had recently departed as second-in-command at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

As if the case wasn't fraught enough, the occupant of the Oval Office was ratcheting up the stakes, and the stress level, for the prosecutorial team. Since his surprise victory in the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump had become locked in an increasingly tense standoff with leaders of the Justice Department, the traditionally rigorous executive branch agency. The FBI, the investigative arm of the department, was the lead federal agency responsible for identifying and interrupting threats to national security. In fulfilling that role, its agents had been probing unusual contacts between Trump's campaign advisers and the Russian government before the election, but the new president had abruptly fired James B. Comey when the FBI director refused to bend to Trump's pressure to either shutter the probe or publicly exonerate him. The dramatic removal, less than four months into Trump's arrival in the White House-and six years before Comey's ten-year term was set to expire-prompted McCabe to open an investigation of the president. It also compelled DOJ leaders to appoint an independent special counsel to take over the Russia investigation and to determine if, by removing Comey, the president had intended to obstruct that probe. In social media posts, Trump had repeatedly blasted the ongoing investigation led by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, the widely respected former FBI director. Trump questioned why Democrats and their sympathizers should not also be subject to federal investigations, and McCabe was one of the president's top targets. In Trump's view, McCabe sat alongside the ranks of Hillary Clinton, Comey, and others whom Trump labeled as criminals.

McCabe had, in fact, erred. He had initially given investigators a false account of his role in leaking information to the press. That was why he was no longer the current FBI deputy director. But the president wasn't supposed to decide if that wrongdoing rose to the level that it should be prosecuted criminally. In fact, he should have steered far clear.

Under a system of guidelines and case reviews honed over more than a century-and then tightened significantly following the Watergate scandal-the Justice Department had a tried-and-true method for deciding whether to criminally prosecute a U.S. citizen. That careful review process had made the Justice Department a beacon for democracy worldwide. And that was in no small part because every time, deep in the bureaucracy, the real work of evaluating a case began with attorneys like Shields and Kent. They were among a class of career attorneys who did their jobs year in and year out, under Republican presidents and Democratic ones, insulated from politics and expected to focus on the facts of a case and how the law applied given each particular set of circumstances. Often, attorneys drew cases based solely on merit and the track record they had amassed in successfully representing the government. Kent, forty-six, had spent most of his legal career in the D.C. office, investigating and indicting the architects of complex crimes and frauds. Peers viewed him as having a thoughtful legal mind. A Stanford Law graduate, he pored over the details and precedent of his cases. His coworkers in the esteemed Fraud and Public Corruption Section, which handled some of the office's toughest cases, considered him a mensch and "a good soldier." In other words, he didn't shy away from problem cases.

Shields, forty, had been on the government staff for nearly five years, primarily prosecuting cybercriminals who had stolen money or secrets by hacking. A Harvard undergrad and Yale Law School graduate, she had been rated a rising star at the prestigious New York firm Sullivan & Cromwell but left before making partner. Not long after becoming a prosecutor, she and her husband had welcomed their first child, a boy.

The two were what are known as line attorneys, due to their position on the front lines in upholding the nation's laws. They partnered with FBI agents to gather the facts of a case, and when they found evidence of serious crimes, they presented it to a grand jury that met in secret. When a jury agreed with the prosecutors that a suspect's acts merited criminal charges, it handed down an indictment, and the line attorneys proceeded to argue for conviction in court. At key steps along the way, they had to answer to layers of supervisors and section chiefs above them. Those checks repeatedly stress-tested the facts of a case and allowed for healthy second-guessing as to whether prosecutors had properly applied the law. Shields, Kent, and their colleagues in the D.C. office-one of the largest and most prestigious in the country-paused before bringing major charges, gathering in a conference room stuffed with well-worn chairs to "murder" one another's draft prosecution memos. Fellow prosecutors would sit around for hours, attempting to attack a proposed argument as a defense attorney or a judge might in hopes of preemptively identifying flaws that could doom the government's quest for justice.

Like so many of their colleagues, Shields and Kent took pride in not just winning convictions but hewing closely to the Justice Department's strict guidelines for impartial decision-making. Both accepted a fraction of the compensation available at private law firms because of the sense of mission and, candidly, the excitement that came with defending the rule of law. Countless federal prosecutors over the years had eventually moved on to jobs in politics, policy, or even plum gigs in private practice, only to wistfully recall their days on the line for the government. There was nothing quite like running a federal investigation, protecting the public, and having the license to go after bad guys no matter how powerful. The work was a calling.

Nine months earlier, in February 2018, Shields had been a little surprised when her supervisors had assigned her and Kent to investigate McCabe, who for a time after Comey's firing had risen to acting director of the FBI. The prosecutors were tasked with reviewing evidence that he had lied to federal agents about the leak of investigative information to a newspaper. A criminal probe of such a senior public official would normally be handled exclusively by the Fraud and Public Corruption Section. A supervisor in that division had decided Shields would be a good fit for the assignment, but she wondered aloud if he had pulled her into the McCabe investigation because no one else was willing to take it on. For much of 2018, Trump had roared that his Justice Department must fire McCabe. His demand had laid bare that...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593831373
• ISBN 13: 9780593831373
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 480
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland