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

by David Rohde

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

An incisive and glaring condemnation of the justice system post-Trump, Where Tyranny Begins boldly examines what happens when the law fails, and where our country can go from here.

How Donald Trump used threats, co-option, and conspiracy theories to bend DOJ and FBI officials to his will to a greater extent than publicly known—and how Merrick Garland, other prosecutors, and judges failed to hold him accountable before the 2024 election.

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 could fail to deliver a trial and legal accountability by Election Day 2024.

Where Tyranny Begins exposes how ill-suited both the DOJ and FBI are to serve as checks on abuses of presidential power. The rise of hyper-partisanship and the Trump and Biden presidencies have uncovered core flaws in American constitutional democracy that Trump would exploit in a second term. A round of historic reforms equivalent to the post-Watergate reforms that stabilized American democracy in the 1970s are immediately needed. A five-word warning coined by the English philosopher John Locke in 1689 captures the stakes in 2024: “Where-ever law ends, tyranny begins.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393881967
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/27/2024
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	20,498
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

David Rohde is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the author of In Deep and three other books. He is the national security editor at NBC News and a former executive editor of The New Yorker website, where he wrote about the Justice Department, democracy, and disinformation. He is also a former New York Times, Reuters, and Christian Science Monitor reporter. He lives in New York with his family.

Editorial Reviews

09/23/2024

In this robust account, Rohde (In Deep), NBC News’ national security editor, details Donald Trump’s outmaneuvering of the rule of law during and after his presidency. Rohde contends that “Trump successfully used online denigration, the rampant spread of conspiracy theories, and threats of violence to discredit, divide, and intimidate FBI and DOJ officials.” His argument is buttressed by interviews with government insiders, many of whom requested anonymity out of fear of retribution. Throughout, Rohde makes plain that those investigating Trump, including special counsel Robert Mueller, underestimated him by assuming he would be constrained by post-Watergate norms. Instead, Trump undermined public confidence in the Justice Department’s ability to do its job impartially, enabled by Fox News and his attorney general Bill Barr, who undercut the Mueller probe by presenting a misleading exculpatory summary of its findings. Even after Biden appointee Merrick Garland was at the helm of the Justice Department, his staff made errors that stymied the inquiry into Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection. Much of Rohde’s material is familiar, though he peppers his account with new findings, such as background on the FBI’s decision not to subpoena records that could have identified plotters behind January 6: “Five years of Trump’s attacks had reduced the bureau’s appetite for risk.” Readers will be troubled. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Well-equipped to tell this story… Rohde sees the existential danger."

Washington Independent Review of Books - Eugene L. Meyer

"A concise, well-told narrative… should hold up well in the light of history."

David Greenberg

"I am led back to these observations as I read one essay after another—as well as a thoroughly researched, carefully balanced new book, Where Tyranny Begins, by the respected journalist David Rohde—issuing dire warnings that the greatest threat of tyranny posed by a second Trump administration is the threat of a Justice Department thoroughly subordinated, as the Constitution’s design currently permits but as tradition resists, to the priorities and indeed the whims of the elected president of the United States."

New York Review of Books - Laurence Tribe

"Where Tyranny Begins, like all of David Rohde’s work, is deeply sourced and thoroughly researched. It raises the reader above the never-ending assault of headlines to a compelling narrative that sheds light, at last, on the Justice Department’s struggles to reckon with Donald Trump."

Andrea Bernstein

"The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist lays out his investigation of how Donald Trump bent two of the country’s most powerful law-enforcement agencies to his will… An informative overview."

New York Times

2024-05-04
A meticulous chronicle of the excruciating details of the battles between the Trump presidency and the Department of Justice.

In a hard-hitting book characterized by careful research and documentation, two-time Pulitzer winner Rohde, author of In Deep and Endgame, delineates how the Trump White House violated well-established post-Watergate norms about judicial conduct, upending and devaluing the work of the DOJ. The trajectory of the successful attempts to sway judicial philosophy started in the first week of Trump’s presidency, as he instituted the Muslim travel ban, an executive decision that went straight to the courts. Subsequently, the new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, a Trump loyalist—caught lying about meeting a Russian ambassador when he was running Trump’s campaign—recused himself from running the investigation into Russian interference, a monumental decision that would lead to Trump turning against him. After Trump fired FBI director James Comey, deputy AG Rod Rosenstein felt compelled to choose the highly revered former FBI director Robert Mueller to run the special counsel on Russia. However, Trump’s repeated attacks on the department and its officials weakened the ability of the special counsel team to make its case to the public. Moreover, the new AG, William Barr, publicly misrepresented Mueller’s conclusion two years later as proving there was “no collusion” with the Russians, when Mueller’s report was actually more damning. The new scandals over the phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, along with the investigation into Hunter Biden and the commuting of Roger Stone and Michael Flynn’s sentences, all resulted in “myriad Justice Department and post-Watergate norms…shredded by Trump and Barr with seemingly little political consequence.” The resulting situation, Rohde argues convincingly, cannot be rectified by the cautious proceedings of Biden’s AG, Merrick Garland.

A cautionary, relevant study of systematic executive bullying that has cast deep skepticism on law enforcement in America.

Kirkus Reviews