Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Carol Leonnig:

Ultimately, Donald Trump is the person who began the weakening of the Justice Department in his first presidency. We didn’t fully realize the scarring and damage that he was doing.

Preet Bharara:

Can the Department of Justice ever recover from the politicization of the Trump era? This week, I’m joined by journalists, Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis. They are investigative reporters who have won multiple awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for Leonnig’s work uncovering security failures within the Secret Service and the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their investigative series on the January 6th attack, for which Davis was the lead reporter. The pair worked together at The Washington Post before Leonnig’s departure to join MSNBC as its senior investigative reporter back in August. Now, they’re out with a new book, Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department. After the interview, I’ll answer your questions. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

By the way, folks, we have exciting news to share. Vox Media is launching a new weekly podcast, The Long Game, hosted by former national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, and former deputy national security advisor, Jon Finer. Episodes drop weekly on Fridays. The first episode is out tomorrow, Friday, November 7th. The trailer is out now. Click the link in the show notes of this podcast or search The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer wherever you get your podcasts.

How just is the Justice Department? Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis take us behind the scenes. Carol Leonnig, Aaron Davis, welcome to the show.

Aaron Davis:

Thank you for having us.

Preet Bharara:

So congratulations on the book. It is pessimistically labeled, titled Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department. I looked at the back. It’s a great book and everyone should read it and it’s near and dear to my heart, even though it’s heartbreaking in many ways, and we’ll talk about that in a moment. You have quite the book blurb. I’ve blurbed a bunch of books in my day. You don’t have a traditional book blurb. It’s a quote from Donald Trump. Why is that?

Carol Leonnig:

First off, Preet, this book was embargoed. It has a lot of scoopy new details, which we weren’t trying to share with people until we had the full story, this full history told. So you ask blurbs for people early, you may not-

Preet Bharara:

You have to give them the scoops.

Carol Leonnig:

Yes. And also, ultimately, Donald Trump is the person who began the weakening of the Justice Department in his first presidency. We didn’t fully realize the scarring and damage that he was doing, the way he was changing the foundations of this venerable institution with his bare knuckles attacks. And so quoting him seems appropriate since he is the beginning of the end.

Preet Bharara:

So the quote is, “Our predecessors turned this Department of Justice into the Department of Injustice. But I stand before you today to declare that those days are over and they are never going to come back.” And then it goes on a little bit more. And it’s from March 14th of 2025. Are those true words?

Aaron Davis:

It’s a little bit of irony there, right?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Aaron Davis:

Yeah. To Carol’s point, we really did… Couple of years ago, we started writing stories about the investigation in the Donald Trump and investigations after he left office. And people said, “You don’t understand what this place was like and how much damage was done here.” And so we did spend time going back over that and we tried to get you to a place where you understand what the Department of Justice was in when the sun came up on January 6th. And so that’s where we start this book about things as he started to really put his finger on the scale during criminal cases in the last half of his first term.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know that these folks really understand irony. We’re going to talk a lot about the book in a moment. But just to bring us into the present for a second, we’re recording this on November 5th on a Wednesday morning, and the breaking news out of the Justice Department the last few days has been various developments in some of the, what I would, I think, appropriately call weaponized cases, politically weaponized cases against political nemeses, adversaries of President Trump. And I couldn’t help but read the response to Jim Comey’s motion for dismissal of the indictment based on a vindictive prosecution and selective prosecution.

The government’s brief, it just reminded me of it, Aaron, as you were speaking. There’s a line in the government’s brief which tries to counter the argument that there’s anything vindictive going on or vindictive that could be inferred from the social media posts of Donald Trump about various people, but specifically in this case, Jim Comey. It says something like, “It would require a great dose of cynicism to believe something like that.” Well, yeah, color me cynical.

This is a loaded question. How is it that the president can get away with, and people like Ed Martin and others in the Justice Department can get away with the gaslighting they get away with, to say… And whatever you might think about what Democratic prosecutors did. And we can talk about that in a moment. But how does he get away with rhetorically, politically, and otherwise, the argument that he makes straight faced that we are against weaponization and we’re just rectifying the weaponization of the prior administration? How does that work in the real world?

Carol Leonnig:

I’ve said before, I think even to you, Preet, Donald Trump is the master of the megaphone. He understands that repeating things over and over again can make them true for his supporters. He is rewriting fact and history every day. The attacks on FBI agents and investigators who looked at the classified documents case, which was really a slam dunk case under any prosecutor’s eye of a man hoarding and concealing and obstructing an investigation into his withholding of classified documents. He has said now he should be paid $230 million for the violation of his civil rights when that search, which was court approved by a judge with plenty of probable cause and surveillance tape to back it up.

To your specific question about selective vindictive prosecution, he repeats over and over again that he’s fixing the wrongs of a weaponized department. And we know from our reporting that’s baloney because these investigations of Donald Trump for classified documents and for election interference, for looking at people who signed fraudulent elector certificates to try to block a free and fair election, we know that those had probable cause and predicate. They had predicate to begin those investigations and they amassed enough evidence to indict Donald Trump with many, many, many felony counts.

Preet Bharara:

How do you write a book like this and have it come out when, as I just mentioned, there’s news relevant to these storylines happening and evolving every day. How did you decide, “Okay, it’s time to get the draft of the publisher.” Even though as we speak, both of you are reporting very entrepreneurially about these things. How did you have a cutoff point?

Aaron Davis:

Well, our publisher and our editor on this book, I wanted to publish this book before the election last year, and I had hoped that we would get to that point. There was enough material about what had happened.

Preet Bharara:

Carol was slow in the writing. Is that the problem?

Aaron Davis:

The first Trump administration and these investigations and how complex and how interesting they were, there was an entire book to write in those. And we did look out and say, “What are the possibilities of things that could happen here?” When we were writing this book, we were turning in an early draft, Kamala Harris could have been president, Donald Trump could have been president. Our editor said, “This is great. But how are we going to really know if all the things you just wrote about are going to mean anything in a few months?” And she said, “We have to wait and see what happens with the election.”

And so that’s how we got to this moment in time. And you’re right, when Donald Trump got into office again, there was no easy place to end this book. Every day was some new outrage, some new violation of all of the norms that we write about through the first part of the book. And so it’s not easy to have an ending point right now, but there’s a lot to at least understand about how we got here that I think we wanted to bring to light.

Preet Bharara:

So you’ll take this in the spirit in which I mean it. Both the title and the subtitle are enormously depressing. In particular, the subtitle. And I hope you don’t quite mean this. Because you stated flatly and in the past tense, How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department. I would prefer to think this is a story in progress. It’s still developing. And let me present one thesis that I have tried to adhere to more successfully eight years ago or nine years ago than in the current time. And tell me if you agree or not. And that is, the dose of news that the American public gets about my beloved old employer, the Justice Department, is made up of stories about these politically charged prosecutions, whether it’s against Donald Trump or by Donald Trump’s administration, whether it’s locker up in chance referring to Hillary Clinton, or January 6th, or whatever else.

January 6th is a little bit different because there are a lot more people involved. But my thesis has been, that’s a tiny, tiny fraction of the cases that main justice and the 93 US attorney’s offices investigate, prosecute, work on day in and day out. That the vast majority, well over 95% of the cases, are garden variety, fraud, embezzlement, trafficking, drugs, corruption, et cetera, that don’t implicate a presidential candidate or a president or their families. And so in that vast area of prosecution, regular business is the order of the day and everything is fine. And the Justice Department in that sense is very, very far from vanquished. And that we focus on these very, very, very dramatic cases and that’s a distortion. Is that a correct thesis or not?

Carol Leonnig:

I’m going to have to say you’ve got some of it right. Which is kind of presumptuous of me to say that you have a good bit of it wrong. Sorry, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

No, no. Please. Well, because just to be fair, the premise of my question was I think it was easier to say what I just said eight years ago than today. But go ahead.

Carol Leonnig:

Yes. So here’s my and Aaron’s take, I think, as we dig into this book and chose that subtitle very intentionally. We’re actually seeing the subtitle we chose come true more and more every 12 hours. When you say the thesis is everything’s fine, on January 20th, not everything was fine. An acting deputy attorney general came in and fired or reassigned and essentially told people they were going to have to move on from the Department of Justice who had centuries worth of experience in counter-terrorism in the form of George Toscas, who was tearful as he got this email saying, “Yeah, no longer will you be the deputy in charge of national security.”

Bruce Swartz, an icon to Justice Department, prosecutors and lawyers all over the department told, “You’re out,” or, “You’re going to move to this non-existent office.” And he ultimately left. Those are just two of the examples of people on January 20th who learned, “We don’t need your 20 years of experience fighting terror, representing America abroad.” And as the weeks went on, almost the entire public integrity section, which you know well, was decimated after one by one all of its supervisors, as we tell the story inside the room, one by one, each of them resigned rather than comply with an order to dismiss extensive bribery charges against New York Mayor, then New York Mayor Adams.

The satellite offices you describe are doing that bread and butter work. Let’s call it that. They are still doing that bread and butter work. But let’s take you inside the book where you see what’s happening in the DC US Attorney’s Office, where supervisor after supervisor has been removed or resigned rather than do something that is, in their view, completely anathema to fair and equal justice and their oath to the Constitution. Opening up an investigation of Biden EPA grants because Trump believes there must be some crime in giving money to green energy projects. And there’s no factual basis to open the case, but they were ordered to do it. That office is a critical office. Danielle Sassoon, right? I think you hired her-

Preet Bharara:

I did.

Carol Leonnig:

… in the Southern District of New York.

Preet Bharara:

I did.

Carol Leonnig:

US attorney, federalist, society member, Republican. Also, she left along with a whole host of others from the Southern District of New York, the other critical firmament of the Department of Justice. People are afraid to put their name on sentencing filing now in which they allege there was a riot at the US Capitol on January 6th. How much video feed is there establishing that that’s a fact? Well, you can lose your job for saying it in a court filing now.

Preet Bharara:

Aaron, do you want to chime in on that?

Aaron Davis:

It hurt to write some of those words and to really study and think about the word vanquished. I agree with you also. We talked to attorneys in different US attorney’s offices across the country. And in any given week, they do a case that they’re proud of. But anywhere pretty much where this administration has put focus, be it in Virginia, be it in New York, be it in DC, we’ve seen the institution quickly crumble and do exactly what has been ordered from main justice. And so I think there’s kind of a… The people that we talked to for the book feel as if there is a rot and a main justice that is emanating outward.

And yes, you’re right. I mean, the darkness has not come over everywhere in the department right now. But the people we talk to, again, fear that we are just beginning a state of injustice in which politics and prosecutions are just mixed in a way that is not afforded under any credible reading of the rule of law.

Preet Bharara:

Just to be clear, for the record, from my perspective, it breaks my heart that these things have to be said about the Justice Department and these things seem true. I’m 57 years old. The only job I ever wanted to have was to be a line prosecutor in the Justice Department in the Southern District of New York. That dream came true 26 years ago. It’s the one job that I’ve wanted for, I think, 33 years when I took trial practice in law school. And for the first time in my adult life when people asked the question, so this is answering my prior question a little bit, when people ask the question, should I go to the Justice Department? And until fairly recently, not eight years ago, until fairly recently, my answer was an unequivocal yes, if you have the stomach for it and the character for it and the integrity for it.

And now, I waiver on that question. And it seems to me, not to elevate my opinion in any way, when people who are alums of the Justice Department at both the lowest level, which I was, and at one of the highest levels, which I also was, that is the most heartbreaking thing that you can say about the institution, whether you think it’s vanquished or not. And so my question is, all the people you talk to who are alums of the department like I am, how many of them think the way I do?

Carol Leonnig:

They’re devastated, Preet. I mean, they’re absolutely devastated. Inside and out, right? The formers and the currents. You know this. As US attorney, you could say whatever you wanted to the press. You’re one of the people that was authorized to talk to the press. But the great body of prosecutors and FBI agents stay the heck away from people like me and Aaron. Well, they’re starting to come to us and have in the last few years because if there’s one sign of hope about your beloved institution, which I have a great deal of reverence for having professionally monitored essentially what you all did and do, they’re coming out to say this is what’s happening, because whether they’re inside the house or outside, they want the American people to realize what this will cost them.

Will it cost them a terror attack that wasn’t stopped? Will it cost them the possibility that they or their neighbors will be charged with a baloney crime with very little evidence because they drew the ire of the President of the United States or one of his lieutenants? They are singing out when they can this five alarm fire that they are seeing happening to your beloved institution. I think of John Keller, former acting chief of the public integrity section, really a person who never spoke to the press other than in a motion, a pleading. And now, he spoke to us and said that the charges against Donald Trump’s political enemies that don’t appear to have very much of a factual basis, Jim Comey, Letitia James, your client, Adam Schiff, this effort to prosecute those individuals, which is in different stages, obviously, is the hallmark, in his words, the hallmark of a dictatorship.

And I guess I would say that when you have these folks giving their voice to that concern, it’s bound to reach American ears who don’t know the place as well as you do.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think that the public understands or is beginning to understand the problem? I mean, my other thesis is, the storyline resonates with people, in particular the supporters of Donald Trump, the MAGA folks. They don’t distinguish between a local elected state prosecutor, whether in Georgia or in Manhattan, between such a person and the Department of Justice. And this is, I think, an argument you have to grapple with. In either distinctions, but you have to grapple with it. They say to people like me, and I don’t mean to include you in the group, we have different professions, but they say, “All your pearl clutching is very precious.” And Donald Trump says this in the blurb on the back of your book, essentially.

Where were you when this was happening to Donald Trump? Where were you when politics was trying to put Donald Trump in prison? Where were you when politics were trying to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president again? It’s the same thing. You guys did it to him. He’s allowed to do it back. What’s the way you articulated the response to that to a non lawyer, non Justice Department official?

Aaron Davis:

It’s hard to go back and put ourselves in this time period, but you almost have to, if you’re going to have that conversation, you have to go back and look at how much evidence there was and how much concern there was about what had happened when Donald Trump fired Jim Comey and when there were contacts between the Russian government and people in his campaign, and how could the Department of Justice not in good conscience look at that? I mean, these were Republican appointees beginning this investigation, not Democrats, at the very beginning. So I think you do need to go back there and at least try to peel back some of the, as Carol said, the repeating of the lies in a way that’s made them real for people on one half of the political spectrum here.

But I would like to amplify one other thing that Carol said, that there’s a lot of things you could have spent two years writing a book about and could have spent two years writing about mass murders or oath keepers, people that you’d have to really spend a lot of time getting inside their head, and it could take you to some dark places. For the past two years, we have been every day talking to prosecutors and FBI agents and officials who know this department and just love it. It’s really a calling. And the part about this book that I think was hard to see as people started getting fired en masse in the last few months is just how people have put lives on hold, put big paychecks on hold to really do a job that they thought was a calling. And we try to tell the story of the Department of Justice from a very human side here, which is, people are doing this and have been doing this for a long time to some of their own personal detriment for all the right reasons.

Carol Leonnig:

And I would just say one more thing on that, Preet, which is, for the people who are in MAGA world saying, “You did this to Trump, where were you then?” Speaking to the Justice Department. Just as Aaron said, wasn’t it the Justice Department’s responsibility to look at Russian operatives having regular meetings with Trump campaign officials? What would you have had the FBI and the Justice Department do Donald Trump if there were people taking boxes of top secret records owned by the government out of the White House as they left? What would you have the FBI do about the potential risk to national security to have special access programs found by foreign operatives? What would you have had the Justice Department do when a president for the first time worked with his campaign to try to block a free and fair election from being certified?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. But they would say, again, not distinguishing between the department and other places, why on earth should a Manhattan District Attorney… This is their argument, not mine. I’m just being devil’s advocate. Why should he bootstrap a minor infraction on the part of someone who was acting as a private citizen in his books and records when he made payments to a former adult star? How did that rise to the level of a felony prosecution?

Carol Leonnig:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

That’s political. How can it be that the attorney general of the state of New York literally runs on a platform of wanting to investigate and prosecute Donald Trump and then does so?

Carol Leonnig:

Well, that’s actually part of the issue that we deal with in the book, which is, because the institutionalists embodied by Merrick Garland really wanted to stay the heck away from looking political in any way. There was a 15-month ultimate delay between the-

Preet Bharara:

How did that work out? How did that work out, not looking political?

Carol Leonnig:

Well, it was, as one of Merrick Garland’s great admirers said to us, choosing to try to not look political ended up being a political decision. But that 15-month delay, Preet, you’re right about the Manhattan DA and the New York Attorney General, because there were people inside justice not wanting those cases to have come first, wanting the most serious ones to have come first that were led by the Feds.

Preet Bharara:

Did some of them not want them to come forward at all?

Carol Leonnig:

I don’t know about not at all. I mean, the Southern District obviously made a decision. You probably know better than we do. The Southern District made a decision not to pursue one of those cases. And I don’t think I have the final answer on that, but I know people inside justice were despondent that Alvin Bragg ended up going first, Letitia James ended up going first.

Preet Bharara:

Well, he’s the only one who got a conviction.

Carol Leonnig:

Yeah, he did.

Preet Bharara:

He’s the only one who got to the finish line.

Carol Leonnig:

He moved. But-

Preet Bharara:

Right wrong, right?

Carol Leonnig:

… for most Americans, don’t you think that elevating, escalating the value of your property is a little bit different than overturning an election or taking top secret records and lying about it?

Preet Bharara:

Yes. I accept that. January 6th, I guess we talked about it a little bit, and you talked about this in your book at some length. How did we go from a general bipartisan consensus that this was unacceptable violent behavior, a stained not just on the people who performed the act, but on the country, to, as you mentioned earlier, Carol, you can’t even describe it for what it was in a random sensing memorandum in some far-flung US attorney’s office. I mean, that’s, I don’t like to say Orwellian too often, but is that an applicable label? There was a Pulitzer Prize awarded. Am I correct? In connection-

Carol Leonnig:

To the guy you’re looking at.

Preet Bharara:

In connection. I’m looking at you, Aaron. I just want to raise the stakes on the question just a minute. There was a Pulitzer Prize awarded for the reporting that described with great accuracy and rigor what happened that day, what the implications were, what the consequences of the violence were. I mean, are you annoyed at the generalized erasure of that truth? Or do you look despondently or finally upon your Pulitzer?

Aaron Davis:

It’s really hard to walk by the wall in the middle of The Washington Post newsroom where that gold medal hangs in a line. There’s six of them. And the first one’s for the coverage of Watergate and the last one’s for the coverage of January 6th. Everybody still believes and understands almost the same thing about what happened in Watergate. We’re in a place now where half the country believes one thing and the other half believes an entirely different narrative at this point or wants to believe an entirely different narrative about January 6th. And so what do you do about that is obviously a huge question. One of the things we did-

Preet Bharara:

But the prior question is, how did that happen?

Aaron Davis:

How did it happen? There’s an element to this that we’ve picked up in our reporting and just talking to folks who have been very close to these cases and have been in interviews with these folks who were convicted. And a lot of them were embarrassed by what happened, by what happened to them, by what they participated in. It’s not, I think, out of the realm to consider that there’s a massive amount of embarrassment of what happened on that day, and people would prefer to say something else entirely and portrayed as something that didn’t happen that day. The problem is it’s all on camera and you cannot deny what happened that day. And that’s where we keep coming back to in the book.

There’s been a whole lot of versions of reporting and great reporting, not just by us on January 6th. One thing you do get in our book, which is different, is it’s, I think, the first full accounting of what it was like to live that day inside the Department of Justice, from the morning the sun comes up until it goes down. And there you see just the unbelievable realization of what’s going on among FBI agents and prosecutors and beginning to wrestle with this. And by the time the sun goes down, they’re standing on a curb outside of the FBI building going, “We need to get every single one of these guys. This was an abomination.” And it was equally seen as an abomination when they were all pardoned en masse by so many who’d… As I said earlier, we know people in DC, we live next to them who spent weeks and months away from their families trying to prosecute all these cases to watch them all go up.

Preet Bharara:

Can I ask you the question related to this, which is, what does it make you think not about the people who are doing the gaslighting, but the people who are credulous enough to believe it?

Carol Leonnig:

I mean, there’s identity politics here. It goes a little to your earlier question, Preet. People who support Donald Trump that we’ve interviewed basically think he can do no wrong. If you insert the same sentence and say that Biden did X, people who support Donald Trump will tell you that’s just horrific. Just terrible that he did that. But if you put Trump’s name in that sentence, they’re like, “Well, he’s a businessman. He’s a leader. Sometimes, you have to do those things.” So some people throw around the word brainwash, and I’m really uncomfortable with that.

Preet Bharara:

How about cult?

Carol Leonnig:

Definitely identity politics. People have identified him as their savior. It’s a little bit religious. He’s the guy who’s fighting for them in their minds. He’s the guy who’s championing their feeling of being downtrodden, being ignored, their values being devalued by coastal elites. He’s the guy who says what they kind of want to say, which is, you didn’t get the job because a black woman got it. That has become extremely popular. And he’s very, very popular because he’s saying the things that a pretty disaffected group of folks want to hear.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I mean, we’re always sitting around diagnosing some of these problems and we talk about the power he has as the commander-in-chief, and he can call up the National Guard and he can bomb ships and he can order that people be prosecuted. That’s not his power. His power is an unbreakable sway, in the way you just described, over enough of the population that he got elected to the presidency twice. And enough of a sway on enough of the population that most people don’t say shit about what he does in his own party, which is the profound difference between this and Watergate.

Carol Leonnig:

But there’s something else going on which we see in our book, right? That Justice Department officials and FBI agents in the first presidency who have incredible resolve and medal. And as Aaron said so well, it’s a calling. This is a mission. They’re willing to get paid a lot less than they would normally on the open market because they believe that enforcing the laws fairly, sometimes not bringing cases where they have good evidence but there’s no public interest, they believe that’s the right thing to do. We saw their knees buckle in the first. And them admit that their knees buckled in the first presidency of Donald Trump. And so that kind of impact changed things.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis after this. Can I ask this broad question? Then I want to get into some of the inside baseball of some of the cases we’ve been reading about and talking about for the last few years, because you do an enormously incredible job at excavating those things. What have you two learned about integrity and character in researching and writing this book?

Aaron Davis:

I think we’ve all learned in a way that our democracy has these big buildings, downtown Washington, encased and marble, but the buildings, the institutions, their mission is only as strong as the people there doing the job. And I do think that, through a lot of the book, there are a lot of characters who are trying to do the right thing, and we try to highlight that. But there’s a shift now where people think the right thing to do is to do what the president wants done inside the Department of Justice, and that’s just never the way it’s been, never been acceptable.

Carol Leonnig:

We have a line in the book describing how good intentions and stubborn bravery, gutter politics, and fear paved the way for this weakening and undermining and unraveling of the Justice Department that Donald Trump is so successfully implementing right now. And when I think about the stubborn bravery, I’m really proud of some of those individuals as a reporter who’s watching people rising to their calling despite the threat of Donald Trump coming after them. There are several people who do this in the book, but particularly during the Biden presidency, when they know Donald Trump’s going to be a candidate, they know he’s running for reelection. They don’t know if he’s going to win, but they know that he can target them and hurt them.

And they call upon each other to, let’s do the thing. We have to be brave enough to do the thing we’ve always done at justice. We have to do it the way we would do it if it were somebody else.

Preet Bharara:

But do you have… This is maybe a psychology question. Do you have some intuition or insight into what makes the difference between the person who says, “Yeah, I can’t do this and I’m going to resign or be fired because it is not right,” versus the person who does it? Maybe we’re not well-equipped to answer this question, but I wonder if you have a thought. Is it something different about their character? Is it something different about their upbringing? Is it something different about their level of ambition? Is it something different about how they view what is right and what’s wrong? And what’s right is doing what the commander-in-chief says, and I don’t have to exercise independent judgment. And I don’t know, and I could give you six other examples of what the difference is between person A and person B. What do you think?

Aaron Davis:

Super difficult. I am perplexed at some of the things we see going on right now. But I will say that we talked to a lot of folks in the first hundred days of when Trump comes in and people are getting… There’s just almost impossible demands being put on them to where they are saying either go along with what you’ve been told to do, or if you go along with your understanding of the Constitution, you better walk out of here. And every one of these people had to face the reality of their own personal situation in that moment. And do they have a kid? Do they have mortgage payments? Do they have tuition payments? Do they have just the facts of life?

And people have arrived at different places and been willing to do different things. I think people, some who are there have been trying to take the heat and say, “I’ll do this so you don’t have to.” There’s been a lot of personal judgment calls made right now. And there’s a liberty in not doing that and walking out of the department. It’s also walking out on a limb for a lot of folks who are…

Carol Leonnig:

Let’s take the example of Danielle Sassoon. Also in our book, we go into the rooms where she’s making the decision. What is she going to do when one of her very, very well buttressed case, she’s being ordered to dismiss it by Emil Bove, now, a confirmed appellate judge. Emil Bove says, “You’re going to dismiss this Adams case.” And she says, “Why?” And his answer is, “Because we’re interfering with a mayor’s ability to mayor and govern, and this guy will be important to Donald Trump in his deportation policies.” She has to make some decisions. She’s got a lot of Republican cred. She was chosen for that job as US attorney, acting US attorney because she was viewed as somebody Republican who would probably follow what Emile Bove told her to do, but she went with the evidence and she also used her voice to elevate the insanity of what she was being asked to do, what she considered a quid pro quo by writing a eight-page letter to Pam Bondi, which eventually became public.

Preet Bharara:

I want to go back to January 6th for a moment and the Biden administration’s response and talk about the false equivalency that arises from all these shenanigans. So we talked earlier about what people say when there’s criticism of the weaponization of the department now. “Well, Biden did the same thing.” And I think there’s one article anonymously sourced in one place where it was suggested that Biden said something about the pace of investigation of Trump is slow. As compared to four million articles on the other side of the ledger for Donald Trump, including his own posts of animosity, vindictiveness, malevolence, and animus towards the people who are now being picked off and prosecuted one by one.

And the MAGA supporters say same thing. And to the extent there’s not as much on the Biden ledger, they say, “Well, obviously the press is in the tank for him.” Which always tickles me. Because anytime someone’s position is, both the presence of evidence and the absence of evidence support my position, you’re just full of shit and it’s not logical. But as you write in the book, the Biden folks were so allergic, I think appropriately to being perceived as political, that when that one article came out, and I was reminded of this when I read through the book, they made an extraordinary statement, right?

You said it was treated as a five alarm fire inside the AG’s office. Garland and his senior staff conferred on an immediate conference call. I remember this at the time. And within an hour, DOJ issued a public statement reiterating its independence from the White House. And the quote was, “Department of… ” And this is extraordinary now in retrospect in particular. “The Department of Justice will make its own independent decisions in all prosecutions based solely on the facts and the law. Period. Full stop.” Which is actually there’s a period at the end of the first sentence, then there’s a word period. Full stop. Another period. So that’s a lot of definitive punctuation. So it’s meta punctuation. How quaint does that sound now?

Aaron Davis:

Boy, it’s hard to compare the two, right? And just for the-

Preet Bharara:

I know these folks. They had to decide to write period full stop.

Carol Leonnig:

Yeah. But Preet, you left out something which we reviewed.

Preet Bharara:

What’s that?

Carol Leonnig:

Well, you knew about it, right? But you left out something that happens in the book, which is, behind the scenes, Anthony Coley, the communications director for DOJ, gets a call from Evan Perez at CNN.

Preet Bharara:

Yes. Yes.

Carol Leonnig:

Saying, “The president just said, blank. Joe Biden just said this should happen.” And Coley’s like, “Oh, there goes my Friday night.” He actually used a different… He had a glass of wine and he was thinking he was going to have a weekend and he actually used some expletives. But he contacts Lisa Monaco’s office, deputy attorney general, and says, “I got to tell you something.” Merrick Garland, when they get everybody on a conference call, Merrick Garland says to Coley, “Read exactly to me what President Biden said. Read it exactly because I want to know.” And then they draft this statement. So it is actually a five alarm fire for them.

Preet Bharara:

And the actual point on the false equivalency is not that, “Oh, well, Biden did this thing and so Trump does this thing.” It’s that when Biden supposedly did the thing one time, the department freaked the F out and said none of this, even though all those people serve at the pleasure of the president, and they went with period full stop. In any universe, can a Justice Department official under Donald Trump put out a statement like that?

Aaron Davis:

I think you know the answer there.

Preet Bharara:

Well, yes. They can’t all be hard questions.

Aaron Davis:

You got to go… I did not realize until getting into the writing of the book that Merrick Garland, as a much younger prosecutor, was one of the junior staffers charged with writing the section of the federal principles of prosecution that dealt with the keeping distance between the White House and DOJ. And so that sits in his office. This was the guy who wrote the rules about separation and keeping DOJ independent. And so he was going to live that out every day. And I think that’s why he was so careful and cautious.

Preet Bharara:

So I want to get to some of the cases we haven’t talked about and then a little bit of current events before I have to let you folks go. So the Florida Mar-a-Lago documents case. Super interesting for people who follow this closely, but I think interesting for everyone. That strategic decisions have to be made in cases. It’s not always clear what to do. I wrote one book, you guys have written a lot of books, and I have no Pulitzer Prize to my name. But part of what I tried to achieve in my own book was to give people a sense that there’s like a decision tree. Do you arrest today? Do you arrest tomorrow? Do you wait for more evidence to come in to shore up your case? During that time, are illicit proceeds being secreted away? Is evidence being lost? Is evidence being gained? Do we bring the case in this district or in that other district?

And that was at the heart of one of the key strategic decisions to be made here. Can either one of you explain what that strategic decision that turned out to be very consequential on the documents was?

Carol Leonnig:

Yes. When we began reporting on this for the book, we knew the obvious things. Smith brought the charges in Florida, moved his grand jury where he’d been presenting evidence in DC to Florida. Well, what we learned as we dug into this that is new to most readers, definitely new to us, so definitely new to the public, is that Jack Smith was relying on some legal analysis from an appellate lawyer in his office who concluded that the strongest, fairest way to pursue the withholding of classified documents case, their best evidence and their best legal shot at bringing that incredibly consequential case, the most important of the charges was in Florida. And that was for a couple of reasons I won’t bore you with.

Venue, as you know, because you came from the so called sovereign district of New York which often claimed venue with some interesting arguments. Venue is, a prosecutor could make a choice to go to DC, but they might expose their case to risk. Smith thought bringing the case in DC would expose it to the risk of being possibly overturned and he wouldn’t be able to bring a false statement charge. Inside the rooms that Injustice, our book, takes you, Smith presents this to the deputy attorney general’s office and the attorney general’s office before he’s making the charges.

And a national security senior supervisor, David Newman, turns to him and says, “Your biggest risk if you go to Florida is you’re going to get Aileen Cannon. If that happens, you’re dead.” And it ends up being foreshadowing exactly what happens. The case collapses.

Preet Bharara:

Can you remind folks why they were concerned about that particular judge already?

Carol Leonnig:

She had caught, if you will, on the wheel some of the search warrant battles over the actual surprise unannounced search at Mar-a-Lago in August of 2022. And she had made rulings that had a lot of eyebrows on the bench going up because they were so counter to decades of previous court rulings. She got smacked by the appellate bench above her and overturned on one of her key decisions, which was to try to appoint a special master to handle top secret records that are the property of the government and that they recovered when they went to Mar-a-Lago and began searching. Those decisions she made so heavily favored Trump and so heavily ignored other court rulings, she was viewed as very suspect.

Preet Bharara:

On balance, do you think that the team thought that it was the right decision? Or in hindsight, given that Aileen Cannon on fairly controversial grounds dismiss the indictment, does everyone think it should have been brought in Washington?

Aaron Davis:

I think if you were to ask, and you may well get asked, but they were solid. Jack’s team felt that they had made the right call. And there was little disagreement about that. He took his decision to Merrick Garland. And Merrick Garland did ask for an analysis to backstop and double check if all those charges that they were so concerned would be potentially weakened and undercut if they brought them in DC. And his staff came back and said, “Yeah, we do think we agree with Jack staff. There’s a risk in bringing it in DC.” And so those full steam ahead in Florida, they were going to go there. They did, in a very early analysis, think that maybe there’s like a one in six chance that we’ll get Cannon. By the time they actually get closer to making the decision, they’ve said, “Oh, actually it’s about one in three.”

Preet Bharara:

It’s one and three. Right? Because of the dockets that some judges would accept or not accept.

Carol Leonnig:

There was a prosecutor who didn’t want to go to Florida, which was Dave Raskin, who when he found out that Jack had decided they’re moving to Florida, he said, “You all are effing insane.” On the argument that…

Preet Bharara:

I know David. That’s how he would talk.

Carol Leonnig:

I’m softening his language, I suppose, as we’ve heard it reported. But I think it’s interesting that, again, that Southern District view is, if you’ve got a non-laughable argument to make your case in the best possible place you can make it and get the case heard, that’s important. His other quote was, “If we get Cannon, that’s an existential threat to the case.” And he was also right.

Preet Bharara:

Right about that. There’s another thing that happened that I and others speculated about extensively. Armchair quarterback, the issue of whether or not the department should have moved to disqualify Judge Cannon based on the earlier decisions and later decisions. And do you break this story? Because I don’t know that I’ve heard the story before, which is one of the… Again, not that inside baseball, but super fascinating. Describe to the listeners what you say in your book about how that came to pass, because I had not appreciated that Jack Smith wanted to move to recuse her or disqualify her and he was overruled.

Aaron Davis:

It’s true. And it is new reporting to the book. It’s never been reported before, but Jack Smith did ask main justice for their support and asking the appellate court to remove Judge Cannon from the case. And this comes at the point when she finally takes the biggest step of all from the bench, and that is to cite minority opinion by Clarence Thomas to say that the special counsel was never appropriately appointed, and so the case shouldn’t have been brought at all and tosses out the case. And at this point in time, Smith and his team, we report, they decide we’re not only going to file the appeal on this, we’re going to ask to have her removed.

And in doing so, they take a body of evidence to Elizabeth Prelogar, the solicitor general. And it’s not just the tossing of the case, but it’s also previous instances in which they saw Judge Cannon take unusual steps from the bench. One was sealed at the time, but she had begun her own investigation from the bench of prosecutorial misconduct and wasn’t clear where she was originating this from, but the prosecutorial team later realized this is the morning after some of these very arguments are presented in a talk show on Fox.

Carol Leonnig:

Prelogar, the solicitor general refuses to approve, doesn’t approve Jack’s decision that he wants to remove Cannon and ask to remove her. And Smith does not take the next step, which is to ask the attorney general whether he can remove Cannon, essentially appealing, if you will, to Garland to overturn the solicitor general. He never took that step, which if he had and Garland had turned him down, would have to have been reported to Congress.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I don’t know. I always took the position. I don’t have all the facts and I wasn’t in the rooms. They should have made that motion. That motion should have been blessed at the highest levels of the department, but what do I know? It’s more armchair quarterbacking. Is the department really vanquished? How can it be unvanquished in the future?

Carol Leonnig:

Wasn’t that your first question?

Preet Bharara:

I know. But I’m giving you a chance to withdraw, to revise and extend your remarks. In a next administration, Republican or Democratic, I don’t want to believe that the department is too far gone. Can we unravel some of the unraveling or not?

Aaron Davis:

I think so. I’ll take a first couple steps at it.

Carol Leonnig:

Please do.

Aaron Davis:

So Carol touched on this earlier. The fact that people talk to us for this book, the fact that they’re talking outside of the button down DOJ that only speaks through its court filings, we’ve reached a different place where people want to raise the alarm to the American public about what’s going on. They want it to be a different place. I do question how you get there. The next administration comes in, and if it’s a Democrat, does a Democrat keep Kash Patel as the FBI director for the full extent of his 10-year term or balance of it? Does he fire Kash Patel? And if he takes that move, he or she, does that then just solidify that this is a political position and your FBI director is whoever you want it to be. It’s not independent. Same thing with the folks inside DOJ.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. But I’m sorry. Can we just pause it. But if Kash Patel is replaced by someone who did not keep an enemy’s list, that’s helpful. No?

Aaron Davis:

Maybe somebody said the next Democrat should just keep Kash Patel for the rest of the 10 years, and that’s the only way you’re going to get out of this is to push on through. But there are also people who have been promoted inside the department, and we report in the book, had been administered loyalty tests, asked if they support Donald Trump in their new positions. Is the next administration going to go through and try to purge those folks who are promoted based on loyalty and not on merit? And then what does that leave for the civil service and the…

Carol Leonnig:

And does the next attorney general choose the Bill Barr method where you are unapologetic about supporting the reelection of your candidate but you have firm lines, you’re not going to make something up out of thin air? Or do you follow the mode of Merrick Garland and say, “We’ve got to turn the page and let bygones be bygones and be Caesar’s wife.”

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, look, it’s tough. I think a lot of people are doing very bad things. And we’re only 10 months in. And if you believe in justice, you believe in accountability, properly done, properly administered, properly adjudicated. And I guess different people have different views of what that means. So it’s conundrum, but we’ll end it there. Carol Leonnig, Aaron Davis, the book is… For the YouTube people. I don’t know if people know we are on YouTube now. This is the book. Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department. Thank you so much for being on. Thank you for writing the book. Really appreciate it.

Carol Leonnig:

Thanks, Preet.

Aaron Davis:

Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis continues for members of the CAFE Insider community.

Aaron Davis:

There are people that held the line, and I think there are people working now to hold the line in their own way inside and out. There are people who want to go back and make the Justice Department all the things that it was before.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. Stay tuned. After the break, I’ll answer your questions.

Now let’s get to your questions. So folks, we got a lot of questions about some developments that have been happening in the case of United States of America versus James Comey. You remember that he was charged with false statements. I and many, many, many others have proclaimed the charges weak and also inappropriate. And a few weeks ago, Comey, through his lawyers, filed a motion to dismiss the indictment with prejudice based on vindictive and selective prosecution. You may recall at the time that my view of the motion was that it was strong, persuasively argued, and even though it’s the case, as the government points out, that the standard is very difficult and very high.

There’s a high burden you have to meet as a putative defendant in getting a judge to dismiss forever a case on those grounds, vindictive and selective prosecution. And it almost never happens. And that’s probably right. It probably almost never should happen. But it depends on the facts and circumstances of the case. And here, in the last couple of days, the court received the response from the United States to Jim Comey’s motion to dismiss on vindictive and selective prosecution grounds. I think overall, it’s weak. I think overall, it’s divorced from reality. I think overall, it’s selective in its application of the facts and how it characterizes various facts.

It does make some narrow legal arguments that I don’t think will carry the day given the overwhelming proof and evidence of President Trump’s personal and longstanding and well-documented animus towards Jim Comey. I’ll get to one of those in the moment. I’ve just been reading through the government’s brief this morning. It goes to 41 pages. So I don’t have an organized response yet. But let me flip through the brief, explain to you a little bit in light of all the questions, how the government’s responding, mention some of the arguments they’re making, what I think of them, and give you some of my favorite quotes from the government’s brief.

First, let me read you the first sentence. “Defendant James B. Comey Jr.’s motion to dismiss the indictment based on allegedly vindictive and selective prosecution should be denied.” No surprise. “Through a mix of news reports, social media posts and speculation, the defendant weaves a tale of what he calls glaring constitutional violations that resulted in his indictment for making a false statement to Congress and obstructing a congressional investigation.” That’s the interesting wording. Not a lot of speculation here when Donald Trump has made clear his state of mind and his animus in post after post after post. There are other arguments you can make.

Speculation doesn’t seem to be the right word. Defendant weaves a tale. Similarly, it’s a pretty compelling tale. If tale means story, it’s a story worth telling. Later on the first page of the government’s brief, they write, “The prosecution is not vindictive. The defendant has not produced direct evidence of a vindictive motive, and he has not shown that the prosecutor pursued this case solely to punish him for exercising his First Amendment rights, so he has not carried his heavy burden of establishing vindictive prosecution.” So there’s a preview of the argument they’re going to make and say, “Well, you need direct evidence. That’s a threshold the defendant has to meet, not only to get the case to dismissed, but even to get discovery.”

And so they will argue as the brief progresses that there’s indirect evidence, it’s implication, it’s innuendo, it’s inferences based on the things that Donald Trump and others have said, and that’s not direct evidence. I, again, don’t think that will carry the day, but that’s one of the things they’re hanging their hat on. Here’s just another sentence from the introduction, referring to the indictment of Jim Comey, “A duly appointed and unbiased prosecutor presented the indictment.” There are going to be questions about whether Lindsey Halligan was duly appointed and whether Lindsey Halligan was unbiased for various reasons.

The brief, by the way, I will say overall makes really only a passing reference, unless I missed it, a passing reference to the storyline that led us to this indictment, namely the departure, removal, firing, depending on your perspective and what’s convenient for you on the facts of a particular motion, but the departure of the actually duly appointed US attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert. They allied that issue like they do a lot of other things because it’s not convenient for their own storyline. I mean, you read the brief and I think the first thing they talk about with respect to appointments is the intention to nominate Ms. Halligan as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, that comes on page 16 of the government’s brief, without explaining why there was a need to nominate Ms. Halligan.

It’s because the last guy either resigned or was fired because he didn’t think there was an appropriate case to be brought against Jim Comey and/or Letitia James. Then of course, to rebut all the evidence of what Donald Trump’s real animus was, what his feelings were, what his directions were, they point to a self-serving statement that Trump made on September 25th. “I can’t tell you what’s going to happen because I don’t know yet. Very professional people headed up by the attorney general, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They’re going to make a determination. I’m not making that determination. I think I’d be allowed to get involved if I want, but I don’t really choose to do so.”

And I think the responsive argument is going to be something like, “If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.” So the government argues in its brief, there’s no direct evidence, there’s no direct evidence. They have to provide direct evidence. But then admit, concede in a footnote, hey, guess what? Direct evidence is not always required. They concede also, a defendant can sometimes show that his prosecution presents circumstances from which an improper vindictive motive may be presumed, and such a presumption is proper where “The circumstances pose a realistic likelihood of vindictiveness.”

I think even if you’re not a trained lawyer, if you’ve been following the stories and following the evidence, I think you can make a reasonable argument to a reasonable judge that the circumstances here do pose a realistic likelihood of vindictiveness. Next, the government moves on to a pretty technical argument that I don’t think will carry the day either. And that is, they’re relying on the principle that it has to be the prosecutor charging the offense who harbored vindictive animus, right? That the focus is supposed to be on the ultimate decision maker. And then they say in a very carefully worded sentence, “As discussed below, the president does not harbor vindictive animus against the defendant in the relevant sense.”

The word relevant is doing a lot of work there. That seems to me to be a concession that the president does in fact harbor vindictive animus against Jim Comey. But for technical legal reasons, in part because that animus doesn’t arise from things relating to how Comey has conducted himself in the case, I guess, is one of the arguments, it’s not the right kind of animus. But on this issue of whether or not the animus has to be on the part of the prosecutor or someone else, that’s an interesting question. There are vanishingly few cases. There’s certainly not any case that anyone is aware of where the vindictive decision maker is not someone within the prosecution office, but rather the President of the United States.

And I think the Comey argument has the better of it for various reasons, including that Donald Trump asserts that he is in fact the chief federal law enforcement officer of the country. He asserts, in fact, that he has the ability if he chooses to do so to direct prosecutions of institutions, companies, or even individuals. He then, as I mentioned, self-servingly says he didn’t do that in this case, all other available evidence to the contrary. They spent a lot of time citing one case, which they say makes their point. It’s case about a guy who was in prison, who escaped the facility in one district, and was found and was to be prosecuted in a different district.

And the prosecutor from the first district said to the prosecutor from the second district, “I really want you to go after this guy.” As they recite in the brief, the first prosecutor, the US attorney from the first district where the prison break happened, sent an email message to the US attorney for the other district requesting that the defendant be prosecuted for escape. That’s not like this situation. That’s one colleague in one district asking politely another colleague in another district to prosecute someone who actually committed the crime. The easiest crime in the world to prove is escape from prison, because all you got to show is you were supposed to be in prison and they found you not in prison.

Not a good case, I think, by comparison to the facts of the Comey case. Anyway, largely, the government in its response relies on a completely unrealistic and ridiculous analysis of the facts as normal people would know them. They write, maybe the defendant would have a point, “If he had evidence that the president ordered his prosecution, but the defendant has not offered any such evidence.” And you have post after post after post, making it quite clear that that’s what the president wanted. And of course, they butters their argument with the self-serving statements by the president in other circumstances that he didn’t do such a thing. Again, who are you going to believe?

The other legal point they make, and then I’ll give it a rest, is that vindictive prosecution, they claim, can only relate to retaliation for asserting a right during the criminal proceeding itself or a subsequent criminal proceeding. In other words, they seem to concede that in the Ábrego García case, where his lawyers have also made a vindictive prosecution argument, that the vindictiveness relates to his assertion of a right in the proceeding itself, as opposed to exercising some other right like First Amendment right of free speech or something of that nature. Again, I think based on the facts of the case, that also will not carry the day. How do they handle Donald Trump’s very, very deliberate, detailed and explicit social media posts? They say that the Comey view is a contrived reading of the posts to infer an improper vindictive motive. Again, who are you going to believe on that one?

Perhaps my favorite sentence in the entire brief is where the government says, about Jim Comey, “The defendant spins a tale that requires leaps of logic and a big dose of cynicism. Then he calls the president’s post a direct admission.” Well, color me cynical folks with a big dose because that’s what’s going on here. So anyway, that’s my quick read. This is unprecedented conduct on the part of a president, on the part of a justice department, and unprecedented conduct, as we’ve said many times on the show, will sometimes necessarily and justly lead to unprecedented solutions and consequences.

At the end of last week’s episode, I’ve put three questions to you, the audience. The first question was inspired by my conversation with Astead Herndon about kitchen table issues. Astead and I talked about what counts as a modern kitchen table issue. So I asked what you think. Many of you responded and your answers varied quite a bit. Here’s a voicemail from Carol.

Carol:

I always considered it to be things that my parents would talk about once we’d eaten dinner and gone off to do our homework. My parents would sit and talk about affordability, what bills to pay, what things we are going to buy next, how to put us through college.

Preet Bharara:

Carol expressed what I think of as the traditional definition of kitchen table issues, things relating to family economics. But Becky sees the definition as a bit broader. She sent us an email saying, “I don’t think kitchen table issues are limited to pure economics. I think it’s things that are front of mind and that therefore might be discussed around the table and that people think of as being actually salient to them, not just intellectually interesting to discuss.” So for Becky, kitchen table issues are any issues that affect a family’s daily life, not just economic ones. Now, Melissa thinks these issues are changing and becoming more entangled with national politics. She left us this voicemail.

Melissa:

I really do think they are becoming more intertwined because all the policies and everything that’s going on are actually affecting our everyday budget, not just with looking at tariffs and the cost of coffee going up and everything else, but also just how it feels like we’re taking crazy pills.

Preet Bharara:

Melissa, it does feel like that some days. Finally, some of you think the term kitchen table issue itself is outdated and it doesn’t really apply anymore. Here’s a voicemail from an unnamed caller.

Listener:

Kitchen table issues. It just sounds so Leave It to Beaver. I don’t even have a kitchen table.

Preet Bharara:

As for the other questions I asked, regrettably, none of you said you have yet seen the new movie about Bruce Springsteen. But many of you knew the answer to my last question, like this caller.

Joe:

This is Joe from Chicago. The answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42. Love the show.

Preet Bharara:

Thanks for calling, Joe from Chicago. That question, of course, is a reference to the great Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, which I read probably 42 times when I was a kid. Thanks to everyone who called or emailed us. If you have any questions for me, as always, please send them to letters@cafe.com.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guests, Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. You can reach me on Twitter or Bluesky @preetbharara with the hashtag #askpreet. You can also call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338. That’s 833-99 Preet. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is now on Substack. Head to staytuned.substack.com to watch live streams, get updates about new podcast episodes, and more. That’s staytuned.substack.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The supervising producer is Jake Kaplan. The lead editorial producer is Jennifer Indig. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. The video producer is Nat Weiner. The senior audio producer is Matthew Billy. And the marketing manager is Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. Special thanks to Torrey Paquette and Adam Harris. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.