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

Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump intimidated, silenced, and bent to his will Justice Department and FBI officials, from Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and William Barr to career public servants. 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 failed to deliver legal accountability by Election Day 2024. Moving beyond the immediate issues, Where Tyranny Begins exposes how ill-suited both the DOJ and FBI are to serve as checks on abuses of presidential power and how the rise of hyper-partisanship and the Trump and Biden presidencies uncovered core flaws in American constitutional democracy. Rohde calls for a round of historic reforms equivalent to the post-Watergate reforms that stabilized American democracy in the 1970s.

Join New America's Future Security Program as they welcome David Rohde to discuss his book Where Tyranny Begins. David Rohde is national security editor at NBC News and a former executive editor of The New Yorker’s website. A two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, he is a former foreign correspondent and investigative reporter for the New York Times, Reuters and the Christian Science Monitor who covered the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bosnia. He was also a 2020 ASU Future Security Fellow at New America. The conversation will be moderated by New America Vice President and Arizona State University Professor of Practice Peter Bergen.

Join the conversation online using #WhereTyrannyBegins and following @NewAmericaISP.

PARTICIPANTS

David Rohde
Author, Where Tyranny Begins
National Security Editor, NBC News
2020 ASU Future Security Fellow at New America

MODERATOR

Peter Bergen
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Future Security
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University