‘Injustice,’ by Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis
INJUSTICE: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department, by Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis
Bureaucratic inertia! Paralysis by analysis! Caution on steroids! These sound like less-than-scintillating premises for a book, but that’s the story that the journalists Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis discovered in “Injustice,” a painfully accurate account that focuses on the Biden years at the Department of Justice. But the tale does get more dramatic. The Biden story is bookended by the authors’ study of the department during the first and second Trump administrations — what the authors describe as a bad-to-worse carnival of incompetence and corruption.
Leonnig and Davis are both Pulitzer winners who covered events at the Justice Department under both presidents for The Washington Post. (Sadly, Leonnig is now part of the post-Bezos diaspora from the newspaper.) The authors’ great frustration is that, over the past half-decade, the department has lurched from extreme to extreme. The shabby partisanship of the first Trump term was followed, in their view, by an overreaction, with a department led by an attorney general, Merrick Garland, who was so fearful of accusations of partisanship that he did little at all until it was too late.
Most legal stories rely on the inherent drama of trials, but in “Injustice” Leonnig and Davis take on the more challenging assignment of depicting a bureaucracy. Zoom meetings, as a rule, are less riveting than cross-examinations, but their upshots, especially here, can be more consequential. The heart of “Injustice” is the authors’ reconstruction of how Garland led the investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Garland’s team took the narrowest possible approach, focusing only on those who may have committed violent crimes in the riot at the Capitol. “Unless investigators turned up clues from rioters’ phones or financial records that pointed them back toward the president’s campaign,” the authors write, “the decision effectively walled off Trump and his allies from becoming subjects of an F.B.I. probe.”
Garland and his inner circle were so worried that an investigation of Donald Trump would look “political” that they even halted an internal investigation by the department’s inspector general of the lead-up to Jan. 6 because it might have implicated Trump. As Leonnig and Davis write, “The result was that no one was actively investigating Trump’s apparent attempt to block the transfer of power.”
If “Injustice” has heroes, it’s the investigators from the House Select Committee on the events of Jan. 6, who did what Garland forbade his subordinates to do: examine the role of Trump and his White House in the attack on the Capitol. “While D.O.J. was trained on rioters, this team wasted no time going straight to the top for answers,” Leonnig and Davis write.
They found them. Indeed, properly embarrassed by how much the House investigators did find out about Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, especially through a scheme to use fake electors, the Justice Department was reduced to begging the committee “for access to transcripts of the testimony of all witnesses who had given the committee their account of events.” As Leonnig and Davis aptly note, it’s usually Congress that asks the Justice Department for the results of its investigations, not the other way around.
In one way, Garland was tough on a president — that is, on Joe Biden. One day in 2021, Biden answered a shouted question from a reporter about whether he thought the Justice Department should prosecute individuals who defy congressional subpoenas. “I do, yes,” Biden said. In response to that anodyne comment, Garland immediately directed his spokesman to issue a starchy rebuke: “The Department of Justice will make its own independent decisions in all prosecutions based solely on the facts and the law. Period. Full stop.” In our current, parallel universe, President Trump issues specific commands to prosecute political enemies, like the former F.B.I. director James Comey, and Attorney General Pam Bondi doesn’t protest — she complies.
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In the contest between these two approaches, the authors are clearly more sympathetic to Garland’s concerns with ethics and appearances, but the costs of these obsessions turned out to be substantial. Not until the spring of 2022 did Garland approve an investigation of Trump, for hiding classified documents at his home at Mar-a-Lago. Then, finally, in November 2022, Garland named Jack Smith as the special counsel to investigate Trump’s role in the Jan 6. insurrection. By that point, Trump, with the help of an amenable judiciary, was able to run out the clock.
The exigencies of this book’s publication schedule prevented Leonnig and Davis from delving too deeply into Trump’s second term, but they make clear that Bondi is making even the first term look like the good old days. Justice is now all about score-settling: pardons for the Jan. 6 rioters, secret deportations of undocumented immigrants and revenge prosecutions against perceived enemies.
The disturbing takeaway of “Injustice” is that, at the Justice Department, political independence has been replaced by abject servility to Trump, whom Bondi described, in a ceremony at the Justice Department, as the “greatest president in the history of our country.” It’s certainly not the way that Garland thought things would work out. According to Leonnig and Davis, he “felt the awfulness of Jan. 6 had in fact ‘burst a bubble’ of hyperpartisanship in the country, and that the United States was ready to pick up the pieces and move on.” How’s that going?
INJUSTICE: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department | By Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis | Penguin Press | 471 pp. | $32
Jeffrey Toobin is a former assistant U.S. attorney who writes about the intersection of law and politics. He is the author of “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court,” “The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy” and other books.
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