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

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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

The FBI’s Love Affair with Hollywood

Narrated by: Peter L. Bergen
Nov 26 2024
Length: 39 mins

The FBI has had a cozy relationship with Hollywood since the days of the Bureau’s first director, J. Edgar Hoover, working behind the scenes with filmmakers to burnish its image. We explore how the collaboration actually works, how extensive it is, and whether moviegoers are getting spoon-fed a sugar-coated version of the truth.

What is “National Security” Anyway?

Declaring something a matter of “national security” is a great way to get people to take it seriously — and Congress to fund it. After all, what matters more than keeping the United States and its citizens safe from foreign attack? But what about the economic security of the citizenry? Or their health? President Franklin Delano Roosevelt thought those should be included too — and that if the government didn’t prioritize them as national security issues, Americans might begin to look to autocrats to provide for their well-being. Was FDR right?

Narrated by: Peter L. Bergen
Nov 19 2024
Length: 35 mins

The Alt-Right Was Once Just on the Fringes. Here’s How it Went Mainstream.

Narrated by: Peter L. Bergen
Nov 12 2024
Length: 45 mins

After instigating violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, the alt-right movement seemed to crumble — but journalist Elle Reeve, who’s been talking with them for years, says that doesn’t mean their ideas have gone away. She says that their extremist ideology is actually on the rise — and has spread from the darkest corners of the internet to the heart of American politics.

Illusions of Control: Dilemmas in Managing U.S. Proxy Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, New America, Online

Over the last two decades, the United States has supported a range of militias, rebels, and other armed groups in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Critics have argued that such partnerships have many perils, from enabling human rights abuses to seeding future threats. Is it possible to work with such forces but mitigate some of these risks? In Illusions of Control: Dilemmas in Managing U.S. Proxy Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, Erica L. Gaston explores U.S. efforts to do just that, drawing on a decade of field research and hundreds of interviews with stakeholders to unpack the dilemmas of attempting to control proxy forces. The book has been described by reviewers as a “grim but necessary autopsy of America’s policy failures” in the last two decades (Ariel Ahram) and a book that casts light on the “moral hazards and strategic pitfalls of partnerships forged in war” (H.R. McMaster). Gaston’s conclusions point to a need not for more risk mitigation measures and tools, but for more strategic thinking in how risks are managed and weighed in U.S. Security Policy.

Join New America’s Future Security Program as they welcome Erica L. Gaston to discuss her book Illusions of Control. Erica L. Gaston is senior policy advisor and head of the Conflict Prevention and Sustaining Peace Programme at United Nations University Centre for Policy Research. She is also an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a nonresident fellow at both the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Global Public Policy institute. The conversation will be moderated by New America Vice President and Arizona State University Professor of Practice Peter Bergen.

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

PARTICIPANTS

Erica L. Gaston
Author, Illusions of Control
Senior Policy Advisor, United Nations University Centre for Policy Research
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Columbia University Centre for Policy Research

MODERATOR

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

In One Michigan County There’s a Republican Fighting to Restore Faith in Elections

Oct 29 2024
Justin Roebuck, a county clerk in the swing state of Michigan, has a license plate that says ‘’I voted.” Roebuck first began volunteering as an election worker at age 16. Now, he oversees the election process in Ottawa County. But not everyone in his county shares his faith in the voting system. Like election officials all around the United States, he’s gotten accustomed to a high degree of skepticism about his integrity — and the elections he oversees. And he’s on a mission to restore the trust that’s been lost. So how did trust break down? And what’s at stake if it can’t be restored in a place like Ottawa County?

The Mass Shooting that Everyone Saw Coming

Oct 22 2024
One year ago, Maine experienced the worst mass shooting in its history. It turned out many people and institutions had known for months before that the shooter, Robert Card, was in a mental health crisis and heavily armed. One friend even alerted authorities that Card might “snap and commit a mass shooting.” Despite that knowledge — and the state’s “yellow flag” gun law — 18 people were killed. Emotional testimony from an official investigation reveals the failures in a system designed to prevent this kind of violence — and how they might be avoided in the future.

Military leaders who served under Trump sound the alarm about him winning a second presidency, CNN.com

Analysis by Peter Bergen, CNN
4 minute read
Published 9:00 AM EDT, Sat October 19, 2024

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Former President Donald Trump’s suggestion that the US military should be used to deal with “the enemy from within” on Election Day has reignited concerns about what he might ask US forces to do if he wins a second term as commander in chief.

And it is senior military leaders who served under him that have most clearly sounded the alarm about Trump.

The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, told Bob Woodward in his new book “War” that the former president “is the most dangerous person to this country … A fascist to the core.”

And on Thursday on The Bulwark podcast, Woodward said Gen. Jim Mattis, who served as Trump’s defense secretary, had emailed him to say that he agreed with the assessment that Milley had provided Woodward. On the podcast, Woodward said the thrust of Mattis’ email about Trump was “Let’s make sure we don’t try to downplay the threat, because the threat is high.”

Trump has long had a boyish fascination with the military, idolizing World War II generals George Patton and Douglas MacArthur. As a teenager, he reveled in his stint at a military-style boarding school in New York.

Despite that fascination, Trump took multiple deferments to avoid service in the Vietnam War.

When he became president, Trump staffed his cabinet with senior generals. He appointed Mattis, a retired four-star general to head the Pentagon; his chief of staff John Kelly was another retired four-star general, and two of his national security advisers were three-star generals, Michael Flynn and H. R. McMaster.

Trump loves the pomp and ceremony of the military and lobbied for a massive Kremlin-style parade in Washington, DC while, he was in office. In the end, the parade never happened.

Despite Trump’s bromance with the military, senior retired generals and admirals haven’t loved him back. Some even seem to think that it is the former president who is the real “enemy within.”

Going back as far as four years ago, Mattis, provided a statement to The Atlantic magazine that “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.”

Similarly, Kelly told CNN’s Jake Tapper last year that Trump is “a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”

In McMaster’s book, “At War with Ourselves,” a memoir of his time working at the Trump White House, McMaster wrote that in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat, Trump’s “ego and love of self… drove him to abandon his oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution,’ a president’s highest obligation.”

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who revolutionized Joint Special Operations Command, the unit responsible for killing Osama bin Laden in 2011, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times three weeks ago saying he is voting for Vice President Kamala Harris because of her “character.” Unstated in his op-ed was McChrystal’s assessment of Trump, though in the past, McChrystal has said Trump is “immoral” and “dishonest.”

The leader of the bin Laden operation was Adm. Bill McRaven, who in 2020 wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about Trump, saying, “when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security — then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.”

In early June 2020, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen wrote in The Atlantic that he was “sickened” to see peaceful protestors who were protesting the recent murder by police of George Floyd “forcibly and violently” removed from around the White House.

It’s hard to think of any American president who has earned the opprobrium of so many senior officers.

That isn’t to say that Trump doesn’t have some fans among “his” generals. While Trump was in office, New America, a research institution where I work, compiled public statements for and against Trump by retired and active-duty flag officers. We found that five times more flag officers, 255, were critical of Trump, while 54 supported the Trump administration.

One of Trump’s fans is Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who served as national security advisor to Vice President Mike Pence. Kellogg appears in Woodward’s new book “secretly” meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this year. After the trip, Kellogg told Trump, “They are not going to go along with a cease-fire.”

Kellogg is one of the few senior advisers in the Trump White House who didn’t resign or get fired during Trump’s term in office. Given his longstanding loyalty to Trump, Kellogg will likely return to some senior role if Trump wins in November.

If Trump won the election, he wouldn’t be commander in chief until January 20, so he couldn’t order the US military to do anything on Election Day, as he suggested to Fox News. But if Trump were to win the White House – which is a coin flip right now given the close race – as commander in chief and with a pliable secretary of defense, he could order the Pentagon to do pretty much anything he wanted. According to senior officers who served under him, that would be a troubling prospect.

Bob Woodward issues a stark warning on Trump weeks from Election Day, CNN.com

Analysis by Peter Bergen, CNN
11 minute read
Published 2:00 AM EDT, Tue October 15, 2024

Editor’s Note: The story below contains explicit language.

CNN
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The arrival of a new Bob Woodward book has a well-established choreography; enterprising reporters get hold of copies of the heavily embargoed volume a week or so ahead of its publication date and mine it for the news it contains.

Both CNN and The Washington Post, where Woodward retains the honorific title of associate editor, covered the news in the latest book, “War,” last week. And news there was: At the height of the pandemic, President Donald Trump sent Russian President Vladimir Putin a secret shipment of Covid-19 testing equipment, and since he has left office, Trump has called Putin as many as seven times.

Ahead of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden blamed former President Barack Obama for not doing more to counter the Russian leader when he invaded Crimea in 2014, telling a friend, “That’s why we are here. We fucked it up. Barack never took Putin seriously.”

Putin had a heated call with Biden in the run-up to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, in which the Russian president threatened a nuclear war. Later, Biden’s national security team assessed there was a 50% chance Putin might use a tactical nuclear weapon during the Ukraine conflict. It is worth noting that back in March, CNN’s Jim Sciutto had similar detailed reporting about Putin’s possible use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine in late 2022.

As has been the case for previous Woodward books, those who don’t come out well from his reporting publicly dismiss it. The Trump campaign said: “None of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true.”

The deluge of publicity that precedes the publication of Woodward’s book ensures that the book shoots to the top of the bestseller lists before Woodward does any media himself. Even before “War” goes on sale Tuesday, it’s already No. 5 on Amazon’s bestseller list, so it could also be on the way to being Woodward’s 16th No. 1 New York Times bestseller, an astonishing record of success.

Woodward has a penchant for one-word titles for his books about Trump: “Peril,” “Rage” and “Fear.” He has also written extensively about the post-9/11 wars in books such as “Bush at War” and “Obama’s Wars.” So how does “War” stack up against those books, and what are its big themes?

At the heart of “War,” Woodward reports about how Biden’s national security team handled three wars: in Afghanistan, the Ukraine conflict, and the war in Gaza, now in its second year, which has embroiled the Middle East in a widening conflict.

Like Woodward’s several other books about war, the front lines of the conflicts he covers are not on the battlefields but in the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room. I reviewed White House visitor logs showing that Robert Woodward (his legal name) visited the White House more than two dozen times from December 2022 to April 2024, a period that “War” covers in detail.

Woodward rarely strays far from this apex of American power. As a result, “War” is not suffused with the sound of gunfire, but the ringing of cell phones as senior Biden officials get on secure conference calls.

Woodward notes that neither Biden nor Trump spoke to him for this book, but he still got great access. It’s clear from a close reading of “War” that almost every top national security official in the Biden administration spoke with him. Those officials did so surely because they understood that if they didn’t talk to Woodward, their peers certainly would. So, if they wanted to get their version of history told, it only made sense to cooperate with the legendary reporter, who, at age 81, has more energy and puts in more shoe leather than reporters half his age.

Typically, in Woodward’s books, he lets his reporting speak for itself and doesn’t make sweeping pronouncements that tell the reader about his own conclusions, but “War” is different. Woodward, who has covered every president since Nixon, writes that Trump is “not only the wrong man for the presidency, he is also unfit to lead the country. Trump was far worse than Richard Nixon, the provably criminal president. … Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history.” Ouch!

By contrast, the final sentence of “War” asserts, “Based on the evidence available now, I believe President Biden and this team will be largely studied in history as an example of steady and purposeful leadership.”

Biden’s Afghan withdrawal fiasco

Yet, that conclusion of steady and purposeful leadership is quite at odds with the fiasco of the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, which handed the country back to the Taliban, and during which a suicide bomber killed 13 American service members and some 170 Afghans. This was an own goal scored by Biden’s decision to go against the advice of his top generals, who told him the withdrawal of the small contingent of 2,500 US troops then in Afghanistan would lead to the collapse of the Afghan military.

Collapse it did, and now the Taliban rule over Afghanistan with an iron, misogynistic fist enabled by many billions of dollars of military equipment that the US left behind. The Taliban are also accommodating some 20 terrorist organizations, according to the United Nations.

The Afghanistan withdrawal also signaled to Putin that the US was withdrawing from the world in general, which seems to have accelerated his plans to invade Ukraine. Woodward’s reporting underlines this point. He writes that top generals at the Pentagon learned that a few weeks after the Afghanistan withdrawal, “new pieces of intelligence were coming in that suggested Russia was planning a large-scale military attack on Ukraine.”

Biden then dispatched CIA Director Bill Burns, who had dealt with Putin during his stint as US ambassador to Russia, to warn the Russian leader that the US knew he was planning an invasion of Ukraine and to try to dissuade him. Along with Burns on the trip to Russia was the National Security Council director for Russia, Eric Green. According to Woodward, Green “picked up a sense that the Russians were feeling kind of full of themselves after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.” Green told Woodward, “I think it reinforced Putin’s conception about how easy it would be. … Here’s a military force that has been supported by the US for decades at that stage. They just collapsed. The Americans didn’t back them up.”

Biden gets it right on Ukraine

By contrast, the Biden team did show real leadership when it tried to warn the world of Putin’s impending invasion of Ukraine and then, when it happened, steadily supplied the Ukrainians with weapons and substantial aid so that they have held off the Russians for more than two and a half years. This has all been achieved without any American boots on the ground, a key Biden goal for the war.

In the lead-up to the invasion of Ukraine, Biden and his team warned in private discussions with the Ukrainians and NATO allies that, based on their intelligence, Putin was close to invading. They also innovated by making this intelligence public. Not surprisingly, this was met with some initial resistance from the US intelligence community, yet it was smart policy. After all, secrecy serves policy; it is not a policy goal in and of itself.

On December 3, 2021, The Washington Post ran a story headlined, “Russia planning a massive military offensive against Ukraine involving 175,000 troops, U.S. intelligence warns.” Although this declassification of intelligence didn’t, in the end, stop Putin from invading Ukraine, it likely made NATO allies and the Ukrainians better prepared for how to respond once the invasion began.

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If the Afghanistan withdrawal was a spectacular own goal scored by Biden himself since he was the leading proponent of the policy, the Biden administration’s response to the Ukraine invasion was about as good as it gets. Biden wanted to support the Ukrainians substantially but did not want to trigger World War III inadvertently. That policy has largely been a success. When US intelligence found that Putin was seriously contemplating using a tactical nuclear weapon, the Biden administration “mobilized every communication line, calling the Chinese, the Indians, the Israelis, the Turks — countries friendly with Russia” to get them to tell Putin to stand down. He did.

One of Putin’s key goals when he invaded Ukraine was to ensure the country never joined NATO. Instead, because of the invasion, Putin made NATO Great Again. Multiple NATO countries started ramping up their own spending on defense, and the alliance added two new members, the formerly neutral states of Sweden and Finland, Russia’s neighbor.

While the war has stalemated now with a slight advantage to the Russians, who are advancing slowly in eastern Ukraine, in August, the Ukrainians seized hundreds of square miles of territory in the Kursk region of Russia itself, which they have retained. No matter how much Putin’s propagandists proclaim that victory is close, the Russians are estimated to have already suffered 600,000 dead and wounded, according to a Pentagon briefing last week.

The Middle East regional war Biden tried to avoid

A year after Hamas attacked Israel, killing some 1,200 Israelis, the Biden team has not prevented an escalating regional conflict. Instead of showing purposeful leadership, the Biden administration has repeatedly handed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a blank check, which he has used to carry out large-scale attacks not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank and Lebanon, as well as more targeted operations in Syria and Yemen.

The war is Gaza has claimed the lives of 42,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, while the death toll in Lebanon is more than 1,500 since Israel launched a ground operation there in recent weeks, and a million Lebanese have fled their homes, according to the UN.

Meanwhile, the Houthis in Yemen have effectively shut down shipping through the key Red Sea global trade route using Iran-supplied missiles and drones and have also fired them at Israel. In the past six months, Iran has launched two massive attacks on Israel using ballistic missiles and drones, widening the war to the regional conflict that the Biden administration was strenuously seeking to avoid when Hamas launched its attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023.

The possibility of a ceasefire with Hamas and the return of the hostages held by the terrorist group seems quite remote at this point since the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, and Netanyahu are unwilling to compromise, and both seem to believe that the continuation of the war benefits their interests.

On Sunday, the Israeli Cabinet met to decide how to respond to the most recent Iranian missile strike on Israel two weeks ago. Biden has urged the Israelis not to strike Iranian nuclear sites. Let’s see whether they listen. The record so far has not been encouraging.

Biden’s unwavering support for Netanyahu even has a name — “the bear hug”— and while the president has occasionally protested publicly about the level of casualties in Gaza, the de facto policy is strong support for Israel; for instance, the Biden administration is going forward with the sale of $18 billion of F-15 fighter jets to the country.

Earlier this year, the Biden administration tried without success to get Netanyahu not to attack the densely populated Gazan city of Rafah, where an estimated 1.5 million Palestinians were sheltering, many of them evicted from their homes earlier in the conflict.

Biden called Netanyahu on February 15, 2024, telling him, “We already said we are not going to support an operation absent a plan to get civilians out of harm’s way.” Netanyahu ignored this warning and went ahead with the attack on Rafah. Woodward’s assessment of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s efforts to rein in Netanyahu during this period is damning and direct: “It was obvious Blinken had no influence.”

It’s mystifying why the Biden administration hasn’t used more of its considerable leverage over Netanyahu; after all, in the past year, the US has approved $17.9 billion for security assistance to Israel, according to a report by Brown University released last week; the most aid in any year that the US has ever sent to Israel. The Biden administration has halted the shipment of massive 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, but otherwise, the large flow of American weapons to the Jewish state continues.

Vice President Kamala Harris

Though Vice President Kamala Harris adorns the cover of “War” — likely a marketing decision given her presidential run — she does not play a prominent role in the book compared with Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

Yet, when Harris appears in the book, she does give sound advice. When Biden asked her what her view was in mid-April after Iran had fired some 300 missiles and drones at Israel, almost all of which were then shot down by Israel, the US and other allies, Harris said simply, “Tell Bibi to take the win.”

Harris also has one of the funnier lines in the book, saying Biden likes her company because “he knows that I’m the only person around who knows how to properly pronounce the word motherfucker.” Indeed, we learn from Woodward that “Joe from Scranton” sure does use the F-word a lot, particularly when it comes to Netanyahu, who Biden variously describes as one of “the biggest fucking assholes in the world,” “a bad fucking guy” and “a fucking liar.” And for good measure, Biden yells at Netanyahu, “Bibi, what the fuck?” after the Israelis assassinated a Hezbollah leader living in a densely populated area of the capital of Lebanon, also killing at least three civilians.

“War” is a deeply reported account of the wars on the Biden administration’s watch. At the same time, its overall assessment that the Biden team showed purposeful leadership regarding these conflicts isn’t supported by the facts of the Afghan withdrawal, the present conflagration in the Middle East, and even Woodward’s own reporting. However, regarding Ukraine, the Biden administration has operated very deftly, keeping NATO together and expanding the alliance while avoiding any direct American involvement in the war that might have triggered an escalatory response from the Russians. Certainly, this is a real achievement that Biden can savor when he enjoys his well-earned retirement back in Delaware.

It is anyone’s guess what Trump might do about Ukraine if he were to win the presidency, given the former president’s odd bromance with Putin, which even top aides such as Trump’s director of national Intelligence, Dan Coats, cannot explain. Coats told Woodward, “It’s still a mystery to me how he deals with Putin and what he says to Putin. … It’s an enigma, and it hasn’t been broken yet.”

Trump has claimed he could quickly settle the Ukraine conflict, but since the Russians and Ukrainians have been at war for a decade since Putin first seized Crimea in 2014, this seems like wishful thinking.

Can Exposing American Secrets Make You Safer?

By: Peter L. Bergen

Oct 15 2024
Length: 38 mins
Podcast

For almost 40 years, Tom Blanton and the National Security Archive have used the Freedom of Information Act to dislodge and declassify U.S. government secrets, from Cold War backchannels to intelligence failures in the Middle East. Blanton’s “archival activism” is about seeing the full picture, in hopes that policy makers — and the American public — can learn from past blunders. Oh, and they unearthed the backstory behind that famous picture of President Nixon and Elvis Presley in the Oval Office.