EP 803 Are the Justice Department and FBI Free From Political Influence?
Many presidents have attempted to influence the actions of the U.S. Department of Justice and FBI for political means. I am old enough to remember the Saturday Night Massacre, as it was called, in Richard Nixon’s presidency during the Watergate scandal. And the FBI had its own political agenda on the remarkably long, and dubious, tenure of J. Edgar Hoover. However, few presidents have been as indifferent to the distance that should exist between federal law enforcement and the president’s personal desires or prejudices than Donald Trump. New norms established in the wake of the Watergate scandal have been trampled over. He sought to use the attorney general, special prosecutors, U.S. attorneys and the FBI as tools to help himself and his political allies and punish his enemies. Examples too numerous to recount are detailed in David Rohde’s new book, “Where Tyranny Begins.” A Pulitzer Prize winner and national security editor at NBC News, Rohde tells remarkable stories behind headlines long forgotten about the pressure Trump tried to exert on cases like the Russian campaign interference, the Election results in 2020 and many others. It’s recent history and it’s a foreboding reminder at this critical juncture.
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Usually we define vigilantes as the barbarians at the gate who want to disrupt the order of things. What if the state itself becomes that disruptor bringing the chaos not protecting us from it? Two law professors, Jon Michaels, of UCLA, and David Noll, of Rutgers University, make a compelling case in “Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy”, that we are on the precipice of this happening in the present moment. And it’s not the first time in our history when this has happened. It was true when northern abolitionists emancipated southern slavocracy and then, following the Civil War, when emancipated Black Americans sought to implement Reconstruction and were instead faced with Jim Crow laws, designed to maintain white dominance. The book describes the American right’s twenty-first century resurrection of state-supported vigilantism, which has made a roaring comeback following the failed coup of January 6, 2021. The upcoming election and its aftermath will fill in the picture more as we see the traps set for our democracy since January 7, 2021, most noticeable already in red states across the country.
It’s never happened before where a presidential candidate promises to throw sand in the gears of a modern democracy in order to bend all levers of government to his will. Sure, we have had much rumination about how slow or inert government agencies have become, or how there might be overreach on the part of regulators, but never the stated and elaborate effort to to dismantle the capacity of government to do its work. Democracy depends on a government that can govern, and that’s requires what’s called public administration. Our federal government, as well as all levels, including state and local, is made up of a vast array of departments and agencies that conduct the essential business of government, from national defense and disaster response to implementing and enforcing public policies of all kind. In their new book, “Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos”, Dartmouth professor, Russell Muirhead, and our guest, Nancy Rosenblum, a Harvard Professor Emerita, lay out how this new term came about and what might ensue if this approach comes to fruition. Hint: the results are not good.
We have had nearly fifty years of wage stagnation, unaffordable health care, low social mobility, predatory mortgage practices, and inflamed class and race resentments. That’s the same period in which business lobbyists have overwhelmed the scene in Washington, D.C. with smart, aggressive and targeted approaches to influencing Congressional action. And they have had their way. It’s not the familiar caricature buttonholing of the old days where you wined and dined Congressman X to get Y result. And there’s no better chroniclers of this approach than brothers Brody and Luke Mullins in their riveting book, “The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government.” Even the Dodd-Frank legislation in the wake of the banking fiasco in 2009 and Obamacare are products designed in large part by the businesses they were meant to tame in a regulatory sense. The pushback from consumer and environmental groups melted in the heat of the wads of cash and influence just too big to compete with. Is there some simmering pushback now, finally? We discuss this important topic with Brody Mullins on this podcast.
It is somewhat dizzying to think about the radical effect this version of the Supreme Court, the Roberts Court, has had on American life. From the curtailing of voting rights to abortion, affirmative action, presidential immunity, regulatory oversight and gun safety measures, this Supreme Court has thought nothing of overturning precedent and, according to many legal scholars, just make stuff up. Sometimes it leans on the concept of originalism, but uses it as a convenience not a fundamental basis for its decisions. Rather than being a Court that simply calls balls and strikes, the majority of jurists are opining in ways that many consider from their political, rather than legal, perspective. Stanford Law Professor Mark Lemley joins us to discuss the far-reaching impacts of their decision-making and attempts to reform a court that has lost the confidence of a vast majority of the American people.
This week’s two podcasts feature women journalists writing about subjects that put them at potential risk as they uncover abuses and actions that most in our society are shielded from. Alice Driver, author of “Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking On America’s Largest Meatpacking Company” lives in Arkansas a state controlled by two dominant businesses: Tyson Foods and Wal-Mart. She has focused her perceptive and poignant pen on the abuses of workers at Tyson Foods plants, a subject that got some attention during the pandemic, but rarely is reported on. With a workforce dominated by immigrants, some with papers, others with fake documents, a past CEO of the company admits that without this labor force the company could not operate. And yet these immigrants, many of whom are just happy to have a job, are left to the many perils that beset one of the most dangerous work environments in the country. Ms. Driver practices immersive journalism as she learns the stories firsthand from the workers themselves. It’s a compelling read and listen.
There is a line, albeit it a bit curvy, from Charlottesville in 2017 to the mayhem at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The passageways from one event to the other may be found on the dark web where anonymous conspirators reinforce each others darkest thoughts about America in 2024. In her book, “Black Pill”, former Vice News and now CNN correspondent, Elle Reeve, takes her book’s title from the popular reference in “The Matrix” and explores the darkest of all the pills which she describes as “a dark but gleeful nihilism: the system is corrupt, and its collapse is inevitable. There is no hope. Times are bad and they’re going to get worse. You swallow the black pill and accept the end is coming.” With that as a backdrop, she explores in the book and with us the line that is crossed when posturing online morphs into taking action in real life. In vivid detail, she describes the ‘characters’ caught up in this frenzy and their ability to capture our politics.
Labor Unions had immense economic and political power in the post WWII era through the early 1970’s. In the 1950’s a third of all private sector workers were members of unions. For a host of reasons that we explore in this podcast, all that changed and for the last 50 years unions have shrunk to about six percent of the private sector labor force. The public sector unions have bumped the overall number to more than 10 percent and have had a trajectory of their own. We focus most particularly in this podcast on the unionization efforts related to private sector workers which seems to be having a moment. Whether that’s because of labor shortages, the’ take this job and shove it’ attitudes as people reassessed their lives in the wake of Covid 19 or the friendly Administration in the White House over the last four years, there has been a change, best exemplified by successful unionization of workers in a VW plant in the South and a 70 percent approval ratings for unions by the general public. We will explore all of these issues and more with Andrew Wolf, assistant professor in the Department of Global Labor and Work at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, on this podcast.
The profession of long haul trucking is vital to our nation’s commerce. As a career choice, many of us might think of it as one we would never pick because it can be lonely and unsettling as to a normal home life. Some choose it because they like the open road and others because they are repressing certain needs that a less isolated existence might reveal. The darkest underbelly of the profession has demanded the establishment of a new unit within the FBI. It’s called the Highway Serial Killers Initiative. This special unit has linked 850 killings to long haul truckers. Frank Figliuzzi, who is now retired from the FBI, and its former Assistant Director for Counterintelligence, was stunned to realize that these killings were so pervasive so he set out to understand the subcultures involved in the trucking community, that of its victims, basically female sex workers often dispossessed by their families, and the group of agents in the special FBI unit dedicated to trying to stop this grisly practice. He explains what he discovered and revealed in his book “Long Haul.” His acumen in the art and science of investigations is well on display in this podcast.
There is a disturbing history of a fifty-year plan to hijack voting rights in America. Despite Chief Justice John Roberts’ reputation as an institutionalist trying to steer the Supreme Court in a measured fashion, our guest says he’s not a deliberate incrementalist but rather a patient bulldozer. In his first fourteen years as the nation’s chief jurist he overturned precedents in 21 cases. And while we have recently focused on Supreme Court limits on abortion, gun laws, and affirmative action, perhaps the action taken in 2013, in the Shelby County v. Holder case will have the most long lasting effect. It gutted a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act on the basis of the flawed notion that racism in America, and particularly in the South, was a thing of the past. This was the culmination of an effort John Roberts began as a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department where he contested voting rights cases and the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act. David Daley, our guest, and author of the new book “Undemocractic: Inside the Far Right’s 50 Year Plot to Control American Elections” joins us to discuss.