In a hard-hitting book characterized by careful research and documentation, two-time Pulitzer winner Rohde, author of In Deep and Endgame, delineates how the Trump White House violated well-established post-Watergate norms about judicial conduct, upending and devaluing the work of the DOJ. The trajectory of the successful attempts to sway judicial philosophy started in the first week of Trump\u2019s presidency, as he instituted the Muslim travel ban, an executive decision that went straight to the courts. Subsequently, the new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, a Trump loyalist\u2014caught lying about meeting a Russian ambassador when he was running Trump\u2019s campaign\u2014recused himself from running the investigation into Russian interference, a monumental decision that would lead to Trump turning against him. After Trump fired FBI director James Comey, deputy AG Rod Rosenstein felt compelled to choose the highly revered former FBI director Robert Mueller to run the special counsel on Russia. However, Trump\u2019s repeated attacks on the department and its officials weakened the ability of the special counsel team to make its case to the public. Moreover, the new AG, William Barr, publicly misrepresented Mueller\u2019s conclusion two years later as proving there was \u201cno collusion\u201d with the Russians, when Mueller\u2019s report was actually more damning. The new scandals over the phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, along with the investigation into Hunter Biden and the commuting of Roger Stone and Michael Flynn\u2019s sentences, all resulted in \u201cmyriad Justice Department and post-Watergate norms\u2026shredded by Trump and Barr with seemingly little political consequence.\u201d The resulting situation, Rohde argues convincingly, cannot be rectified by the cautious proceedings of Biden\u2019s AG, Merrick Garland.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In a hard-hitting book characterized by careful research and documentation, two-time Pulitzer winner Rohde, author of In Deep and Endgame, delineates how the Trump White House violated well-established post-Watergate norms about judicial conduct, upending and devaluing the work of the DOJ. The trajectory of the successful attempts to sway judicial philosophy started in the first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":173,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}