Steve Bannon delivered an unrestrained message to his podcast audience this week, focused almost entirely on federal law enforcement. “The [Justice Department] is completely corrupt from top to bottom,” the far-right media personality said. “It’s going to have to be purged. It’s going to have to be restructured.”
After insisting that the department will need to get rid of “lots of personnel” after Donald Trump’s possible return to the White House, Bannon added that he sees the FBI as “the American Gestapo,” and he questioned whether the bureau should even exist.
It was, to be sure, a striking perspective, but Bannon’s rhetoric didn’t come out of nowhere. On the contrary, Reuters reported two weeks ago:
Some of Donald Trump’s allies are assembling proposals to curtail the Justice Department’s independence and turn the nation’s top law enforcement body into an attack dog for conservative causes, nine people involved in the effort told Reuters. If successful, the overhaul could represent one of the most consequential actions of a second Trump presidency given the Justice Department’s role in protecting democratic institutions and upholding the rule of law.
The report added that under Team Trump’s vision, the prospective Republican White House would “flood the Justice Department with stalwart conservatives unlikely to say ‘no’ to controversial orders” from the Oval Office. Trump and his operation would then “restructure the department so key decisions are concentrated in the hands of administration loyalists rather than career bureaucrats.”
All of which is to say, while the Justice Department’s “independence and impartiality” are its core values, that would effectively end if Americans return Trump to power.
None of this is being kept secret. Bannon presented the plan — out loud, from behind a microphone, while looking into a camera.
At this point, I suspect some readers are thinking, “Wait, didn’t Trump and his team already do this during their time in office?” The answer is, sort of.
As we’ve discussed, the former president spent much of his White House tenure trying to transform Justice Department prosecutors into his own personal attack dogs. The New York Times reported in 2022 that Trump and his team “tried to turn the nation’s law enforcement apparatus into an instrument of political power” to carry out the Republican’s wishes. A Washington Post analysis published soon after highlighted the many instances in which Trump not only leaned on the Justice Department to follow his whims, but also his efforts to push federal law enforcement to validate the “Big Lie” in the wake of his election defeat.
The Republican’s weaponization efforts reached a truly amazing pinnacle less than a month before Election Day 2020, when Trump publicly called on federal prosecutors to go after Joe Biden — at the time, the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee who was leading the Republican incumbent in the polls — accusing him of undefined crimes. The then-president added that his future successor shouldn’t be “allowed” to run against him.
On Oct. 7, 2020, with early voting underway across much of the country, Politico published an especially memorable headline: “‘Where are all of the arrests?’: Trump demands Barr lock up his foes.”
The next day, the Republican incumbent spoke to Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo and called on the Justice Department to “indict” his perceived Democratic foes — including Biden.
After his 2020 defeat, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, said the former president “regularly” wanted to use the Justice Department to retaliate against critics.
So why would the sequel be worse than the original? Because Trump and his team didn’t succeed in transforming the Justice Department into an arm of his political operation — though they now believe they’ve learned from their failures and know precisely what to do to complete the regressive vision.
It’s difficult to imagine this shifting a lot of votes in the fall. Much of the public probably doesn’t realize that federal law enforcement is supposed to operate free of partisan interference, and those voters are likely indifferent to the potential consequences of Team Trump politicizing a “purged” Justice Department.
But when it comes to the stakes in 2024, little matters more than this.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
