Centuries of Expertise “Out the Door:” New Book Explores Trump Impact on DOJ

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Next, a deep dive into America’s Justice Department. Pulitzer Prize winning journalists Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis have co-authored a book examining the internal and external pressures faced by the DOJ and the FBI. The New York Times bestseller investigates how these institutions were weakened by fear, delay, and political pressures under the Trump administration. They sit down with Michel Martin to discuss the shocking accounts of partisans and enablers undoing democracy over the last 10 years.

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks, Christiane. Carol Leonnig, Aaron Davis, thanks so much for talking with us.

CAROL LEONNIG: Thanks for having us. 

AARON C. DAVIS: Thank you.

MARTIN: So you’ve written a book where you take a deep dive into the Trump administration’s efforts to politicize the Justice Department. But there have been two significant news events that have happened in recent weeks, and both of them speak to the reporting that you did over a long period of time. I mean, the first is the anniversary of the January 6th mob attack on the Capitol, which was an effort to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

And the second was that special counsel Jack Smith, he testified behind closed doors. He wanted to testify publicly, but he testified behind closed doors. But then ultimately the testimony was released (at least a, a transcript of a tape of it was released).

So the first thing I wanted to ask you, if you could remind people who may not remember, who was Jack Smith? Why was he appointed special counsel? And why was his testimony so significant? 

LEONNIG: Yeah. Jack Smith was a kind of legendary public corruption prosecutor in the Department of Justice who had gone on to another career, but was appointed and chosen by Attorney General Merrick Garland to be the special counsel investigating evidence of two potential crimes by Donald Trump and some of his allies. The first, as you know well, was the one about whether or not he had illegally interfered and tried to overturn a federal election. And the second was much more cut and dry and about Donald Trump’s efforts that were pretty open to hoard classified records after he’d left office and conceal them from the Justice Department when faced with a subpoena to return them.

MARTIN: The thing about, that you make clear in your book is that Jack Smith was a vault. I mean, he did not count in his leaks. He was very disciplined. He expected everybody on his team to be very disciplined. So I was curious about what struck you when you first heard him lay out his case in his own words, because of this testimony.

DAVIS: Well, I would say that you know, a lot of the things that he spoke to and that closed door testimony that we, you know, got the transcript of on New Year’s Eve echoed some of the findings that he had in his first report that came out last year and, you know, kept rubbing up against some of the things in his second report that remains hidden from the public about the classified documents case. And, you know, both of those were cases that were very thoroughly investigated in his office. And you’re right, he was a vault. We happened to benefit from a little bit of timing in that you know, we were working on this book for two years, but we went on a second book leave after the election and spoke to people who were just beside themselves that these cases had never gotten their day in court. That a jury had never had its chance to decide if Donald Trump, you know, had acted illegally and should have been in jail, let alone in the White House. And so there was a point in time when people did talk to us and tell us just how deeply and carefully they had reported, or they had investigated these, these cases. And you know, we try to lay that out in the book.

LEONNIG:  I’d add one thing, which is that, you know, Jack Smith in his testimony said so declaratively in a way that no one’s ever heard before – but we reported about his team saying this – but he had said so declaratively that he had evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to convict Donald Trump on both obstructing justice and hoarding classified records, and illegally interfering in a federal election and he described Donald Trump as “the most culpable for these actions.”

And also, I think another striking thing, if I can add, was to hear Jack Smith say you know, he found lots of reasons to bring this case, thought he would win if he ever got to trial, and felt very strongly that this had been misrepresented by Donald Trump and by his Republican allies.

MARTIN: And so the question becomes why did these cases never go to trial?

DAVIS: Well, one of the biggest reasons is that they did not use the full four years that they had between January 6th, 2021 and when voters went back to the poll in 2024. We go into deep detail about how they really wanted to start – they had a different idea to how to run this investigation, that it would start with the rioters, all the various crimes that were so clearly had taken place on camera at the Capitol. And that was an approach you know supported by Attorney General Merrick Garland and his senior team. And they thought they would build their way up the way you’d kind of build a mob case almost, and kept flipping people until you got to the top organizers. It took a long time before they kind of realized that the things that Donald Trump was doing and those around him regarding trying to push this false narrative that brought people to the Capitol, to the, you know, to the Washington on that day, was a very different investigation than looking at the rioters who went in and, and the physical violence that took place that day. In fact, we report that the FBI did not sign off and begin an investigation on the very things that became the heart of Jack Smith’s investigation until April of 2022, so a full 15 months after January 6th. And in that time period, Donald Trump’s resurgency really took hold. And he knew during that time period that he was not under investigation. He heard no footsteps, none of his allies were getting subpoenas or, you know, there were no search warrants. And so in that time period we don’t know what would’ve happened if things had gone differently.

MARTIN: I mean, obviously hindsight is always 2020. But why did they approach this from the standpoint of sort of the guy on the street as opposed the person telling the guys on the street what to do. I don’t, what – especially since, as you pointed out, and so many people have said this, is that this was the most photographed criminal event in history. So, Carol, do you wanna take that? Why did they take that approach?

LEONNIG: The “why” was twofold. One, Donald Trump, we discovered, damaged the Department of Justice much more dramatically than we realized in his first presidency. He had personally, individually targeted and humiliated and harassed middle level career public servants, and some high, but mostly some public, some public servants who were in the mid career range. And all they were doing was doing their job in the first administration, investigating part of the Mueller probe, Russian intervention in the, in the 2016 election. And he went after them so personally that there were people who had scar tissue from that and recoiled from the idea of directly investigating Donald Trump again.

The second answer to your great “why” question is that Merrick Garland upon arriving, upon being appointed by Joseph Biden, took it as his mission to restore faith in the Department of Justice after Trump’s presidency. And his idea of restoring faith was to avoid, like the plague, any inference or appearance that he was going after someone for political reasons. The problem was, as his close allies told us, it ended up being a political decision NOT to pursue the open evidence of Donald Trump’s potential crimes without fear or favor, which is the DOJ way.

LEONNIG: It became political because three different times prosecutors and FBI agents were part of the firmament and followed the manual to the letter were proposing that this department look at evidence of a potential crime: first in December of 2020 about fake electors; next in February of 2021 about the confluence of Trump close allies and Oath Keepers and Proud Boys; and then the third time around when a new prosecutor is assigned to start to look at potential connectivity with Trump and the riot, HE proposes and is turned down looking at a sort of war room in the Willard that had been operating in December and January around January 6th, where Rudy Giuliani was famously encouraging people to fight to block the certification of the election with these fake electors and pushing swing state Republicans to do that. The political decision ultimately was these career people were saying, wait a minute, we look at evidence of a potential crime and we follow it, and we’re not doing that now.

MARTIN: Wow. So Aaron, to that point, listening to Jack Smith’s testimony, he says, quoting here: 

“The evidence here made clear that President Trump was by a, was by a large measure the most culpable and most responsible person in this conspiracy. These crimes were committed for his benefit. The attack that happened at the Capitol, part of this case, does not happen without him.” Having laid that out so directly, was that obvious at the time? I guess I’m just trying to understand here is that were the political leadership of the Biden administration were they also sort of intimidated by the kinds of things that former President Trump was doing? You see, I’m trying to understand what role they played in all this.

DAVIS: Yeah, I think one of the kind of heartbreaking moments that, you know, people we spoke to in our reporting, and then you can see laid out in documents that sometimes Republicans have made public in the months since they retook Congress and the New Year here, is that some of the very evidence that the FBI cited in 2022 when they begin their investigation was known to the public over a year before that. And that includes the, you know, the fake electorate documents, if you will. These documents that were, you know, republicans in different swing states were claiming that, you know, Donald Trump won the election, and those were being spirited to Congress on January 6th to create the pretense that Mike Pence could say that there’s dispute about the outcome of this election and send it back to the states. Those were things that were footnoted in the FBI investigation and opening that investigation April, 2022, that had been discovered and put out in public under a FOIA request, a public records request back in March of 2021. In fact, we know that the, you know, the National Archives had taken their concerns about these to the Department of Justice even before January 6th, and they were turned down.

You know, Carol really hit on an important point, which is that the idea was that they didn’t think that there was, there was a clock ticking when this whole, when this starts back in 2021 and Merrick Garland wanted to, you know, turn back to post-Watergate period, where these decisions would bubble up slowly and organically from the blind prosecutors and the FBI agents on the case. There were however times when there was pushback, especially in this level of the top of the Washington field office and the FBI, where they were very reticent to go directly back at Trump. And that was a big roadblock and took a long time to get over. And there was no point in time that we discovered where Merrick Garland or the Deputy Attorney General, Lisa Monaco, said, no, we need to go do this now. There’s enough evidence to go forward. And then you end up in this kind of situation where Jack Smith is handed the investigation and really has to sprint to try to get where he gets. 

MARTIN: Then here comes Jack Smith. And you describe him in the book as moving with real urgency once he was appointed in contrast to the more than year long delay after January 6th. Did you have a sense that he walked into that investigation understanding that there had been these kind of, this institutional hesitation? I’m just curious about why he pushed it so differently?

LEONNIG: Smith knew that there was a clock, but he was not –according to all the reporting that we did, all the interviews we did with various people briefed on all of this inside – he was not saying to himself, gee, an election is around the corner. I’ve gotta convict this guy and get him to trial before we’re there. He said to his team, over and over again, we have a duty. We only have so much time, it’s of the essence that we answer the question for the American people. And for Donald Trump, did he engage in a crime? Was there evidence to indict and ultimately bring him to trial. Both for the public and for Donald Trump. He said, you know, this guy’s running for office, why should these allegations be hanging out there in questions? They should be answered by us.

And as he said in his testimony, he didn’t come in on November 18th, 2023, deciding we’re gonna indict this guy. But he did say to both teams, the classified documents team and the election interference team, let’s get on this and let’s have some decisions made quickly. To the documents team, he shocked ’em when he said, let’s make a decision on indictment within three months.

MARTIN: So let’s fast forward, I mean, President Trump was reelected. He did immediately pardon everyone connected to the January 6th mob attack on the Capitol, including people who assaulted police officers, cost some of them their careers because they were no longer able to physically function in their role because of the injuries they sustained that day. You also report that, you know, beyond Trump himself, your reporting shows that many lawyers and operatives who worked to overturn the election were never held accountable. So the question I have for you is what consequences has that had?

DAVIS: You know, someone I spoke with after the book came out said, that’s, what you just raised is perhaps more the concerning part at this point. You know, people voted for Donald Trump. They knew all these allegations were out there, but there’s this other kind of insidious element, which is that no one else who acted at Trump’s behest around January 6th or in, you know, pressuring Justice Department officials to take actions that were politically expedient were held to account for their actions. And, you know, the person I spoke to, former very senior FBI official said, that’s created a situation now where there’s no warning sign, there’s no blinking red light for anyone in the current administration to think that they personally could be held to account for what they do at Trump’s request in this current administration. I think that has to be a real concern at this point in time. And, you know, the fact is there are several people who worked in the capacity as Donald Trump’s personal defense attorney, is now running the Department of Justice.

MARTIN: And Carol, stepping back, your book argues that the independence of the Department of Justice really isn’t protected by law, but by norms. And if – after all that has now transpired, how damaged is that system of norms now? 

LEONNING: It’s really devastated, Michel. It’s, it’s, as we describe it, this is a three act tragedy, a play with a lot of sad moments. But perhaps the saddest is the ending in which – and the things that happened even after we put down the pen in April of 2025. And that is twofold. One, centuries worth of experience and expertise have been kicked out the door. People that protect you and me and intervene when there’s a national security threat, a foreign adversary attempting something that really puts us at risk, people that are the masters of unspooling and unraveling criminal conspiracies and protecting us from them. That’s one.

The second part is the norms you describe are obliterated, in that the president of the United States has self-described, and his attorney general has described him as, the chief law enforcement officer for the country, the person that Pam Bondi says she works at the directive of. And as we have reported at my new organization, MS NOW, in extensive detail, Donald Trump has ordered up the prosecutions of people he does not like, and people he considers his critics, is calling for people like Jack Smith to be in jail and has succeeded in directing and installing the individuals who will indict his perceived foes. That is the stuff of Kings. To quote John Keller, a former acting head of the public integrity section, “This is the hallmark of a dictatorship.” And it’s gonna take a long time for us as a country – and politicians on the Democratic and Republican side – to sort through, how are we going to shape that department in the future to insulate it as we attempted to insulate it after Watergate from a White House willing to break those rules?

MARTIN: Carol Leonnig. Aaron Davis, thank you so much for talking with us today.

LEONNIG: Thank you. 

DAVIS: Thanks so much.