The Undoing Of The Department Of Justice
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Hi, it's Carrie. Our co-host Tanya Mosley and I will be doing an end-of-the-year Fresh Air Plus bonus episode, answering listener questions about the show and about ourselves. You can send the questions now to freshairplus at npr.org, with plus spelled out. That's freshairplus at npr.org.
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. If you watched the televised hearings of the select congressional committee investigating the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, you probably remember the dramatic testimony of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. Officials of the U.S. Department of Justice who were investigating Donald Trump's alleged interference in the 2020 election were watching, too. But at the time, they had no idea who Cassidy Hutchinson was. That's one of many striking revelations you'll find in the new book by our guests, veteran investigative reporters Carol Lindig and Aaron Davis. Lindig and Davis write about Donald Trump's powerful impact on the Justice Department, including his efforts to protect friends and punish those he considers enemies.
But much of the book focuses on the Biden years, when Trump wasn't in charge and the Justice Department pursued investigations into the violence on January 6th, and eventually into Trump's alleged interference in the 2020 election and his retention of thousands of government documents. Their account is a bracingly clear explanation of why those efforts failed to get either case against Trump in front of a jury before his re-election rendered them moot. It's largely a story of officials acting in good faith, trying to adhere to standards of fairness and non-partisanship, perhaps too rigorously at times. The authors say Trump's targeting of prosecutors and FBI agents in his first term in office likely played a role in the department's caution.
Carol Lennig worked for 25 years at The Washington Post. She's won or shared in five Pulitzer Prizes and has written two books about Donald Trump and another about the U.S. Secret Service. Lennig left The Post earlier this year and is now a senior investigative correspondent for MSNBC. Aaron Davis is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post. He's won two Pulitzer Prizes and reported from 14 countries. He was lead reporter and writer for an investigative series on the January 6th attack, which won the George Polk Award, and with other Post coverage, the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Linick and Davis's new book is Injustice, How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice Department.
We recorded our conversation last Thursday. Well, Carol Lennig, Aaron Davis, welcome to Fresh Air. You know, Trump was charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States and related charges related to his alleged interference in the 2020 election. We will never know what a jury would have made of the charges and the evidence because it never went to trial. But part of that is because the Department of Justice didn't get moving on that investigation quickly, not really until well into 2023. But it's interesting. I learned in your book that very early after the election, before the January 6th attack, a woman in government, Waleska McClellan, flagged what looked like a coordinated campaign to subvert the election results.
Tell us who she was, what she did.
I'm impressed, Dave. That is a good find in the book and a scoop that Aaron and I were both really struck by when we came across it in reporting for this book. Well, Leska McClellan was a top investigator in a little-known inspector general's office for the National Archives. And in December of 2020, after Donald Trump has lost the election to Joe Biden, she is presented with a series of certificates from people that are not the Secretary of State and various states, swing states, in which... Unusual signatures are given that suggest there are alternate electors who are going to challenge whether Biden actually won the election in their swing state. And she begins to review these with her fellow investigators and then decides the best thing to do is to go to the Justice Department, a prosecutor team that she knows.
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